Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

the EU must be its invasive oppressor. Must be because there was no other possible candidate.

This book explains Brexit England's WW2 obsession quite convincingly.

But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled.

If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in unmapped wastelands, it may be because the same attitudes have been at work.

The new ‘Dunkirk spirit’ is a kind of hysteria in which the ordinary vicissitudes of life (especially those involving Brits abroad among foreigners) are raised to the level of epic suffering.

we see here the political application of Oscar Wilde’s dictum ‘That we should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ This will become, in essence, the methodology of Brexit. It will triumph by teaching the English to take trivial things – the petty annoyances of regulation – very seriously indeed, and to regard the serious things – jobs, communities, lives – with sincere and studied triviality.

The Tory MP Sir Gerald Nabarro was quoted as saying, ‘This would be a disaster. Our beer is world famous for its strength, nutritional value and excellence.’9 (In truth, it was world-famous at the time for being piss-poor.)

‘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:

a fatal flaw in the Brexit project: the self-pitying grievances that it was designed to address could not in fact be addressed. Why? Because they did not exist.

This is a party that has plunged its country into an existential crisis because it was too weak to stand up to a minority of nationalist zealots and tabloid press barons.

The duty of the people of England when the honour of its rulers was at stake was always plain: to suffer gloriously for as long as it took for the whole thing to peter out in exhaustion and futility.

it is not possible simultaneously to ask people to trust the state and to tell them that the state has no business in any part of their lives

the gross inequality produced by neoliberalism is increasingly incompatible with democracy and therefore, in liberal democracies, with political stability.