Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

it is no exaggeration to say that Anglo-Irish relations were in the years immediately before the Brexit vote more cordial than they had ever been in the entire tangled history of ‘these islands’.

when your neighbour is going mad it is only reasonable to want to understand the source of their distress.

the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit.

Self-pity thus combines two things that may seem incompatible: a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority. It is this doubleness that makes it so important to the understanding of Brexit, a political phenomenon that is driven by ideas that would not otherwise combine.

The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from ‘heart of Empire’ to ‘occupied colony’. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.

‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.

Rhetorically, it was a commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent.

The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union.

This, too, is highly characteristic of the kind of discourse from which Brexit emerged, a peculiar cocktail of raw xenophobic hysteria, cool intellectual glibness and pure pantomime.

On the one hand, as the White Paper on entry to the Common Market emphasized in 1971, the experience of not being invaded was one of the genuinely distinctive things about being British: ‘Our physical assets and our economy had suffered less disastrously than those of other Western European countries as a result of the war: nor did we suffer the shock of invasion. We were thus less immediately conscious of the need for us to become part of the unity in Europe...’

Heroic failure became such an important part of British culture because it celebrated personal virtues that were understood to be at the core of national identity and encapsulated in that most English of English words: pluck.

And in that stew, a crucial ingredient is the transference of victimhood: the claim that white men, rather than being (as they are) relatively privileged, are in fact victims. Victimhood has been seen to be the currency of power – women, people of colour, ethnic minorities appeal for equality by reference to their collective suffering. In this sense, the far-right is the white man’s #MeToo movement. Not only am I not guilty, but I am in fact a victim.

It had to somehow put together two fears – the older one about Britain’s loss of status in the world after 1945 and the newer concern that the privileges of whiteness were being eroded.

One of the most remarkable features of the Leave campaigns in 2016 was their absolute refusal to countenance any discussion of Ireland.

‘Invasion’ is thus a structure of feeling that unites the two great neuroses – encompassing the unfinished psychic business of both the Second World War and the end of Empire.

In the annals of Brexit, we must not neglect the part played by the prawn cocktail flavour crisp. In April 1991, The Times reported that ‘Britain’s heritage of multi-flavoured potato crisps is threatened by the refusal of the European commissioner for industry Martin Bangemann to countenance changes to an EC directive restricting the use of artificial sweeteners in foods’.

But when the need to compete with alternative ideologies went away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU gradually abandoned its social democratic and Christian Democratic roots.

The distress is real. And Brexit gives the pain a name and a location – immigrants, and Brussels bureaucrats. It counters their sense of powerlessness with a moment of real power – Brexit is, after all, a very big thing to do.

Brexit is often explained as populism, but it is driven more by what Timothy Snyder in The Road to Unfreedom calls ‘sadopopulism’, in which people are willing to inflict pain on themselves so long as they can believe that, in the same moment, they are making their enemies hurt more: ‘such a voter is changing the currency of politics from achievement to pain, helping a leader of choice create sadopopulism. Such a voter can believe that he or she has chosen who administers their pain, and can fantasise that this leader will hurt enemies still more. [This] converts pain to meaning, and then meaning back into more pain.’

Brexit is a strange hybrid – a genuine national revolution against a phoney oppressor.