When writing a column, I may settle quickly on a topic, and within a few hours, it’s done, and, if I am lucky, days in advance. Sometimes, I’ll be halfway through when another, better, idea comes to mind. Only rarely, though, do two topics compete for attention right up to the wire. This week is one of those occasions.
The first topic, not surprisingly, is the British vote to leave the European Union. Like most people here, including Emirati officials with whom I have discussed it, I had thought that it would go, narrowly, the other way.
In another column six weeks ago, I noted that, although not eligible to vote, I was undecided. I eventually opted for Remain, partly because of my fears about the impact of Brexit on Ireland, where the British-ruled north and the Irish Republic in the south would need to be divided by a “hard” border, and on Scotland, which might seek another referendum on separation from the United Kingdom. What really tipped me towards Remain, however, was the rise in anti-immigrant and racist feelings fuelled by unsavoury rhetoric from some Brexit campaigners. Since the vote, those feelings have spilled into public discourse in a shocking way. It will require huge determination to put that genie back in the bottle.
The initial economic fallout is worrying, though there are new opportunities for UAE-UK relations. The political impact is mind-boggling, not just for the governing Conservatives, now engaged in choosing a new prime minister, but also for the opposition Labour Party, which has descended into civil war.
British politics is now in a process of dramatic change, with no clear outcomes in sight. With the situation changing daily, sometimes hourly, I make no predictions. There will be plenty of opportunity over the next few weeks and months, and perhaps years, to comment.
My second topic relates to the United States. We will know in November whether the revolt against Britain’s political establishment will find an echo in the presidential elections, following the insurgencies of the Sanders and Trump campaigns in the primaries. Might we need to learn to live with a president Trump, with all of his xenophobic and ignorant rabble-rousing? Quite possibly.
Today, though, I shall focus on the aftermath of the shocking murders in a gay nightclub in Orlando when a self-styled supporter of ISIL killed 49 people and injured another 53. It was a horrendous hate crime, whether or not the killer was partly motivated by internal conflict over his sexual orientation.
One might have hoped that the incident might have, finally, provoked serious thought about the need for proper gun control laws, at least to prevent the sale of semi-automatic rifles such as the AR-15, similar to the weapon used by the Orlando killer and in other tragedies including that at the Sandy Hook elementary school in Connecticut. Banned in 1994, they went on sale again in 2004 when Congress, under heavy pressure from the gun lobby led by the National Rifle Association, failed to renew the legislation.
Following Orlando, however, the US Senate failed even to agree to stronger checks on the background of buyers and blocking purchases by people on the FBI’s terror watch list. This is lunacy – but testimony also to the political power wielded by the NRA with its five million members.
Instead, within a seven-day period after the Orlando shootings, a single online gun warehouse in Pennsylvania sold over 30,000 AR-15s. I wonder how many of those will surface in years to come in other mass killings.
In Britain, the narrow majority for a Brexit has thrown the UK into constitutional crisis while strengthening anti-immigrant feelings there and across Europe. In the US, politicians have responded cravenly, yet again, to a horrific incident of mass murder by failing to clamp down on gun ownership.
In Europe and the United States, as well as in the Middle East, troubling times lie ahead.
Peter Hellyer is a consultant specialising in the UAE’s history and culture
