Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

The image of an open, tolerant England, a place of opportunity and acceptance, is not gone but, after June 2016, it has been diminishing rapidly.

To each other, the English and the Irish were no big deal. But the fact of it all being no big deal was a very big deal indeed. Just because it was undramatic, we should not have let this state of affairs be taken for granted. It is hard won and it should not be lost sight of in all the madness of Brexit.

It is a short journey into what Raymond Williams called a ‘structure of feeling’: the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit.

It has also been convenient to think of the EU as the vector of neoliberalism, as if Thatcherism (and the failures on the Left that contributed to its ascendancy) were an unEnglish aberration.

The imaginary oppression that has helped to make things happen is primarily a phantasm of the reactionary Right and I therefore concentrate much more on its political manifestations within conservatism.

The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves when we do not get what we know we deserve.

Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two antagonistic forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance.

It therefore requires both a sense of superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can bring them together.

He sat in cold silence through the meeting, then rose and delivered his verdict: The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed it has no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.

Even in making the argument in 1971 that Britain should stay out of Europe and forget all its pretensions to be a world power, Joan Robinson, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, appealed to a notion of innate moral superiority that could be nurtured in splendid isolation: ‘I think that, as empires go, the British Empire was not discreditable and that to give it up (in the main) without a fight was a very unusual example of common sense.

A. J. P. Taylor, a conscious ‘Little Englander’. Here he is on the Common Market: ‘There is no British opinion about “going into Europe” intellectual or otherwise. No one understands it. No one cares about it, for or against, except perhaps for a few politicians who have taken up the affair as a means of professional advancement.

when, a month after Taylor wrote this, the government’s White Paper on entry went on sale, there were queues outside the bookshops. It sold over a million copies, making it the best-selling official document in British history. During that month of July 1971, 100,000 people a week paid their 25 pence for a copy.

The form of irresponsibility would change, but the fundamental attitude would remain, especially among the occupants of comfortably cushioned chairs for whom ‘life will go on just as before’ whether or not Britain is in the EU. The droll affectation would prove to be a deadly affliction.

After Enoch Powell destroyed his mainstream political career with the inflammatory racism of his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968, no senior figure with credible designs on power would again so explicitly blame blacks and Asians for England’s failings. The dog whistle would replace the megaphone. This left a vacancy, which was filled by the European Union.

‘Brussels,’ as Richard Weight puts it, ‘replaced Brixton as the whipping boy of British nationalists.

The creation of an institution like the National Health Service was a novel kind of conquest, a turning of British energy inwards to face the great enemies of squalor and disease. It was indeed a new world that was won, and one that made more positive difference to British lives than the grabbing of colonies had ever done.

Conversely, the gradual erosion of the welfare state after the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was, among other things, an undermining of the seawalls that kept those oceans of self-pity at bay.

There was always, moreover, a link between the rise of reactionary and xenophobic nationalism in England and inadequacies in the functioning of the welfare state.

The Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum would of course make the same false connection: we are anti-immigrant because we wish to defend the welfare state. Powell didn’t actually believe in the welfare state, and most of the leading Brexiteers don’t either, but they knew that many of their supporters did so.

Brexit, too, is an attempt at a bloodless revolution and as such a kind of parodic replay of the previous one in which seriousness becomes game-playing, meticulous planning becomes seat-of-the-pants opportunism, a profound sense of public duty becomes narcissistic posturing and deep, difficult change becomes epic symbolism: the first time as policy, the second time as performance.

is possible, when overlordship and victory turn sour, to think of oneself as the underdog and the loser. This would be, in Leigh Hunt’s terms, the tribute that self-pity would pay to self-love, a masochistic desire to seek out humiliation combined with a grandiose sense that such humiliation was an outrage against an exceptionally fine people.

Fifty Shades is, indeed, hilariously bureaucratic. Submission, as it happens, is like EU membership: tediously legalistic. Poor Anastasia finds herself embroiled in complex negotiations before she can get down to business.

What kick can a still quite influential, prosperous, largely functional country get from thinking of itself, as foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt would do in October 2018, as a nation incarcerated in a neo-Stalinist prison of cruel subjection? The frisson comes, surely, from the allure of irresponsibility. In the bondage games playing out in the English reactionary imagination, Britain has spent forty-five years hanging from the ceiling in the Red Room of Pain, with clamps on its nipples and a gag in its mouth. For a significant part of its ruling class, this is a posture of absolute powerlessness that corrupts absolutely.

The idea of the nation] enables us to daydream as we live out our lives, as the factory-girl daydreams with the aid of her paperback thriller’ – ENOCH POWELL

But this idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves.

The Falklands was a kind of make-believe England with no black and brown immigrants. Its pre-industrial terrain was a fantasy version of the post-industrial landscape that Thatcher herself was in fact creating at home in England, without the empty steel plants and rusting machines.

The imagining of a German-dominated Europe through the evocation of Hitler was not an authentic popular prejudice against an old enemy.

In 1975, many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters. But instead of this common experience creating a common emotional ideal of Britain’s relationship to Europe, it fed two completely opposite stories, each very deeply felt.

One of these stories was that the catastrophic experience of the first half of the twentieth century carried two lessons that must never be forgotten: unrestrained nationalism led to war, and Britain could not stand aside from the fate of Europe.

Another poster read simply: ‘Forty million people died in two European wars this century. Better lose a little sovereignty than a son or daughter.’

‘For some,’ writes Saunders, ‘the surrender of national sovereignty to the EEC was a betrayal of all those who had fought and died “to deliver Europe from Nazi dictatorship”.’

This takes martyrdom to new levels of self-annihilating fantasy: death in the anti-EU resistance is not a fate or even an act. It is a daily pleasure.

It lay quiet for a while but emerged again in an appropriately demented form – the mad cow war. This half-forgotten episode of national hysteria is notable in the first place because the crisis that led to it was entirely self-inflicted by the British state. And it was, furthermore, an example, not of the alleged overregulation of British life by Brussels but of reckless underregulation driven by neoliberal ‘free market’ ideology.

Someone had to be to blame – and it was, of course, the Germans. Germany, frustrated at the very slow and weak response of the European Union, imposed a unilateral ban on the import of British beef. This became a declaration of war, with England again standing alone against the Teutonic menace.

This German ‘war’ lasted in the right-wing English press for a full decade – almost twice as long as the actual war of which it was a hallucinatory reprise. The War of Cordelia’s Burger was fought mostly through journalistic hyperventilation. ‘A small Somerset town finds itself at war with Germany’ is the headline on a 1996 report in the Daily Express that representatives from the Bavarian town of Immenstadt had asked not to be served British beef at a ceremony in Wellington to mark the twinning of the two towns.

The Sun warned its readers of ‘a showdown’ with the European Community ‘on a scale rarely seen since the Battle of Britain’. The beef ban was forcing ‘us to fight to save our traditions and freedoms’. The paper urged its readers to harass German tourists – and even to boycott German pornographic films.

In a double-page spread in 1999, the Daily Mail ran a large photo of fake Nazis from ’Allo ’Allo! with a think-piece headlined ‘In the week that Germany kept the old feud alive by illegally banning British beef: Why it’s a good thing for us to be beastly to the Germans.’ It was written, not by some hack but by the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson.

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.

The paranoiac must at some stage ask himself: but why are they out to get me? Since there was no actual evidence of any Western European hostility, the answer must lie in some deeply hidden motivation.

This is the perfect-circle of self-pity and self-love: we deserve to be loved but we are hated because we are so wonderful.

The pay-off for all of this lurid imagining would come with Brexit. In February 2016, when David Cameron was seeking concessions from Brussels in advance of the Brexit referendum, the Daily Mail, forgetting its own history of appeasement, brazenly compared him to Neville Chamberlain in a rabid front-page editorial headed, of course ‘Who will speak for England?’43 (While drawing these parallels between the Nazis and the EU, it added in the smaller print, ‘Nobody is suggesting there are any parallels whatever between the Nazis and the EU.’)

(The old veteran was a far-seeing visionary, or perhaps just a fan of The Simpsons, where the term ‘surrender monkey’ was invented in 1995.)

It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers.

Tory Marxism. Edward St Aubyn epitomized it in Some Hope: ‘They’re the last Marxists… The last people who believe that class is a total explanation. Long after that doctrine has been abandoned in Moscow and Peking it will continue to flourish under the marquees of England. Although most of them have the courage of a half-eaten worm… and the intellectual vigour of dead sheep, they are the true heirs of Marx and Lenin.’

Hilarious Quote

Franklin was, as Stephanie Barczewski puts it in her richly illuminating history Heroic Failure and the British, ‘a failure on a monumental scale, but he nonetheless became one of the greatest Victorian heroes’.2 Indeed, Franklin’s story is one of repeated debacle.

By 1854, the Admiralty alone had spent £600,000 (tens of millions in today’s values) looking for Franklin. ‘Some of the rescue expeditions had themselves had to be rescued.’5 Heroic failure acted like a magnet, drawing ever more failure towards itself.

complicated realities are no match for the glamour of heroic failure.

The grand balls-up is not new, and in English historical memory it is not shameful. Most of the modern English heroes, after all, are complete screw-ups.

She points, for example, to the ten memorial statues in Waterloo Place, a key site flanking the great processional route up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace: five relate to the disastrous Crimean War, one is of Franklin and one is of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died with four of his men having failed to get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen’s pragmatically planned and unromantic Norwegian expedition.

He continued, sombrely, to evoke the more recent memory of the Great War: ‘the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.’