Boris Johnson’s hard Brexit smash and grab and the politics of the mob

Boris Johnson is taking the UK on a rocket ship to hell.

It is a rocket shop fuelled by nativism, xenophobia, empire nostalgia, and a brand of British exceptionalism that has infected a large section of the predominately English, predominately white working class with false consciousness as to the why’s and wherefores of their parlous condition after three decades of Thatcherism, seasoned with austerity.

This privileged Old Etonian’s contempt for parliamentary democracy and sovereignty, the judiciary and common decency was on full parade in the Commons on a day — the 25th of September 2019 — that will live in infamy.

For on this day, Boris Johnson returned to the despatch box not as the wounded and chastened prime minister of a democracy, who’d just been found to have acted unlawfully by UK Supreme Court in the unanimous opinion of eleven judges, but instead as the ideological progeny of Oswald Mosley, intent on placing himself at the head of a gathering nativist xenophobic mob.

As he thundered and spat words of incitement, accusing his opponents of betrayal, cowardice, sabotage and surrender, it was chilling to think that the far right terrorist who murdered Jo Cox in 2016, Thomas Mair, would have been listening from his prison cell and hollering…