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On December 12, voters in the UK went to the polls to decide the fate of Brexit. The results were clear. By an overwhelming majority, Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has been thrust into the majority with the simple promise to “Get Brexit Done.”
With the largest mandate a Conservative PM has won since Margaret Thatcher in 1987, Boris Johnson will spend the next five years redefining the UK’s place in the world, beginning with finalizing Brexit by the end of next January. This win is certainly a victory for national sovereignty around the world, and we should celebrate it. But the way sovereignty won should worry limited-government conservatives, both in the UK and right here at home.
Let’s break this down into two sections: the obvious and the less obvious.
First, let’s look at the obvious implications for nationalism around the globe. With the popular mandate to bring the UK out of the European Union, Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party have firmly placed themselves in the vanguard of the re-establishment of sovereignty across the globe.
This is a good thing. The EU is a messy bureaucracy. It’s a top-down regime run from Brussels that imposes extensive taxes and ludicrous immigration policies on European nations. With the UK’s exit from this bureaucracy, the wheels are in motion for the ultimate fracturing of the EU.
Indeed, nationalism in eastern Europe has already threatened to force other exits, such as in Hungary and Greece. Even in Germany, the shining center of gravity for Brussels’ bureaucracy, the AfD, a far-right party that is reminiscent of the fascist parties of the 20th century, sits as the chief opposition party in Berlin, driven to prominence largely due to the pro-EU policies of Angela Merkel. All across the continent, the EU faces significant threats.
Within the UK itself, this new election has led to a much-needed revival of independence movements. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party won 50 of the 59 seats they contested, up from 35 seats in the last election. This mandate has led to suggestions of a second independence referendum. While Conservatives have adamantly refused to authorize a new referendum, they may not have a choice in the matter once Scotland holds regional elections in the semi-independent Holyrood (Scotland’s parliament).
Across the channel, the Democratic Unionist Party lost its majority in Northern Ireland for the first time ever, leading to rumors of Irish unification. Both of these results are good. If Northern Ireland and Scotland wish to become independent, then London should wave them farewell.
This desire for sovereignty was also reflected in Spain in 2017 when Catalonia voted overwhelmingly to go it alone in lieu of staying with Madrid.
The less obvious implications, however, are the more important ones. Since the 1980s, conservatism in the UK has largely mirrored conservatism in the US, with such things as low taxes, low government spending, and less regulation. Margaret Thatcher reset the political spectrum across the Pond and brought the UK closer to political thought in the US.
With the ascendance of Boris Johnson, however, this British resurgence of conservative thought seems to have been brought to a close. Boris Johnson won traditionally-Labour seats across the UK, and especially in northern England, where working-class people have seen industry decimated by increasing automation and globalization. He did this by making promising related to traditionally-Labour issues, including a dramatic increase in spending for the NHS and a marked growth in government economic interventionism.
Johnson’s Conservative Party looks more like the party of Benjamin Disraeli than that of Margaret Thatcher. Indeed, Johnson’s preferred description of his politics is “One Nation Conservatism”, a throwback to Disraeli’s time as PM. This shift away from austerity may have pushed Brexit over the edge, but it threatens to isolate American conservatism on the world stage, and Republicans should be wary of thinking that the same strategy will work in the US.
That leaves me with two final warnings. The first, to Johnson Conservatives: be careful of making promises to the British people that you cannot keep. You may talk like Benjamin Disraeli, but unlike him, you do not have an empire to back you up economically. Thatcher was correct in her assertion that socialism would eventually strangle the UK. Do not forget that.
As for the second warning: these two ideologies are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to be both for a limited-government at home and to be wary of global organizations abroad. The rise of this binary thinking, both here in the US and overseas, threatens to relegate Reagan/Thatcher conservatism to utter irrelevance. If nationalist-conservatives do not make a better case for our arguments now, we will lose our chance to do so in the future.
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Scott Howard is a constitutionally-minded conservative freelance writer with a focus on fiscal matters and foreign policy. He has been an active contributor to The Liberty Hawk. You can follow him on Twitter: Follow @thenextTedCruz
Editor’s note: As a quick observation, while a return to the sovereignty the EU has encroached upon is a good thing, we can all hope that Europe does not devolve into the nationalism and regional rivalries that led to two devastating world wars in the last century. It’s really quite unfortunate that European powers-that-be are so dismissive of American politics and American ideas that the ideals of federalism, as we have made it work in our constitutional framework, were not used to enable the many benefits of the EU’s joint economic system (including peace and stability through mutual cooperation) without enabling the crippling bureaucracy or the encroachment of sovereignty. -Justin