On November 25, 2018, the UK will submit to the EU summit an agreed plan for the country's withdrawal from this union. If the plan is approved at the summit, and then approved by the British House of Commons, the long-awaited Brexit will finally take place.
True, it is highly doubtful that this event will be greeted with enthusiasm by the activists and supporters of the Leave.EU movement, whose efforts ensured Brexit’s success in the June 2016 referendum. Britain will remain indefinitely in a customs union with the EU, which means that the border between Ulster and the Republic of Ireland - the only land border of Britain - will not be clearly demarcated. At the same time, Misty Albion loses any influence on the economic and foreign policy of the union, since the British will immediately leave all the political institutions of this union.
This strange result of the negotiations, which Theresa May’s government came to, had two consequences. The political crisis inside her office, which left three leading members, including the Minister for Brexit Affairs Dominic Raab, and - no less important - a powerful lobbying attack by the transatlantic liberal press in favor of refusing the UK Brexit and returning to the situation until June 2016. Technically, it is proposed to do this in different ways: most often it is said about a repeated referendum, in which British citizens should be offered a choice between a deal named after Theresa May and the cancellation of the results of the first referendum. It is interesting, however, something else, namely, the new arguments that the American and British press offers to substantiate such a review.
The main argument in favor of the abolition of brexit is just revealed the facts of foreign participation in the campaign Leave.EU.
A few days ago, in the British newspaper The Observer, with reference to the openDemocracy website, information was published about the correspondence of executives of the American information-analytical company Cambridge Analytica with Leave.EU movement leaders Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore, published in the public field. The correspondence dates back to 2015, and in one of his letters, Banks informs his American partners that he intends to begin campaigning for the country's withdrawal from the European Union.
Since British laws prohibit foreign financing of elections in the country, Banks asks colleagues for advice on how to get around these laws and get safe information and money support from a legal point of view. In general, nothing really criminal. The only problem is that the owner of Cambridge Analytica was then billionaire Robert Mercer, Trump’s future sponsor in the 2016 elections, and the deputy director of this company is none other than Trump’s future campaign manager and subsequently his adviser Stephen Bannon.
Bannon himself did not participate in the correspondence, but his address was included in the copy, and he obviously knew about Banks' negotiations with the people of Mercer. It is important to note that in 2015, Bannon did other things far from the presidential election, and he had nothing to do with Trump himself until the summer of 2016. This did not prevent the liberal press of the two countries from calling for the creation in England of a commission commission analog Robert Muller and stating the need to link two investigations - Russia’s interference in the American elections and America’s interference in the British elections. However, some of the most zealous journalists like Carol Kadwolladr, who wrote a sharp sketch on this topic on the website of The New York Review of Books, do not hesitate to draw conclusions and immediately demand to find a “Russian trace” both in financing Brexit and in Trump's victory in the 2016 election.
What does Russia have to do with it? And how can she be related to Robert Mercer? Everything is very simple. Banks and Wigmore visited the Russian embassy in London several times and communicated with Russian Ambassador Alexander Yakovenko.
This is the first proof. The second is the presence in the Leave.EU team of the head of the UKIP party Niipe Faraj, who had departed into oblivion, in which Kadwalladr sees a kind of link between Putin, Trump, Assange and Banks himself. It is clear that all this is suspiciously reminiscent of Vyshinsky’s accusation of Trotsky with Bukharin, and of Bukharin with Japanese intelligence. Someone met with someone, someone talked about something, which means that there is a conspiracy to seize power.
Meanwhile, in some respects, the liberal critics of Trump and Brexit are, alas, right. And this rightness gives strength to their position. Indeed, the British, campaigning for Brexit and voting in favor of him, undoubtedly counted, firstly, on a special relationship with America, and secondly, specifically on friendship with Donald Trump in the event of his victory. It seemed that as soon as Trump was in the White House, he would immediately sign with the UK some kind of agreement on special trade relations and establish a close military-political cooperation between the two Anglo-Saxon powers, which would once again highlight the role of the UK as a priority partner of the United States in NATO .
These hopes were not destined to come true - instead of a special relationship with Washington, London received high tariffs on the import of aluminum and steel from Trump, as well as the threat to ban the importation of British cars into the US. Political relations with the May government at Trump are little better than relations with Merkel and Macron. And it is hardly for this that England bears the blame.
Strictly speaking, something similar happened to Russia - except that, unlike Britain, it did not make any drastic political actions in the hope of a “new beautiful world” that would bring “ghost” to humanity in 2016 across the West populism. But there were hopes for Trump and the refusal of confrontation with Russia in our country - and they were not justified.
Of course, the talk that Trump and Brexit are not connected in any way and that this double victory in 2016 is exclusively a product of internal discontent with globalism is somewhat naive. There are good reasons to believe that serious elite groups of the West played the game of so-called populism, and it seems that the information that the liberal media share with us about this issue is extremely selective. In this case, it is clear that the case is not limited to Mercer, let alone Bannon. But it is also clear that Russia is playing the role of a scapegoat in this game, on which all sins for the global order of 2016 are hung. Exactly for the same reason that Bukharin was called in 1938 a Japanese spy, and not English or American.
You can be sure that in the future a handful of truths about the "origins of populism" will be lost - in the numerous revelations of liberal media luminaries, among the heaps of blatant lies about the "Russian trail", "Putin's plot" and "Moscow's hand".
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editors.