Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

As Barczewski astutely notes: ‘Heroic failure… neither effected nor engendered decline; on the contrary it arose from British power and dominance, and from the need to provide alternative narratives that distracted from its real-life exploitative and violent aspects.’

But heroic failure was an even more powerful mechanism for assuaging guilt: it reimagined the British conquest of the earth as an epic of suffering, not for the victims, but for the victors. It took the pain of the oppressed and ascribed it to the oppressors.

To turn it into a statement of strength, it was crucial that there be no self-pity. Indeed, it was not simply that there must be no self-pity – this absence must itself be supremely present. This is how strong we are: even in the face of disaster we don’t cry, we don’t complain, we don’t stop to reason why and we never breathe a word about our loss. We are going out now and we may be some time. This is possible only when you are in fact confident of your superiority.

Its concern, instead, is with character. 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.

In some respects, Brexit is a perfect vehicle for this zombie cult. It fuses three of the archetypes of heroic English failure.

This is in its own way quite audacious – England dreaming itself into the status it so triumphantly imposed on others. It is a dramatic bypass operation. In reality, Britain went from being an imperial power to being a reasonably ordinary but privileged Western European country. In the apparition conjured by Brexit, it went straight from being the colonizer to being the colonized.

When ‘Mum and Dad are fine’ (which is the substance of this story) merits a triple dose of Dunkirk spirit, the currency of heroic failure is deeply debased.

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.

But the end point of the journey would be reached in September 2018, when foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt warned the Europeans that they would be very sorry indeed if they continued to insult Britain by not giving it the Brexit it was demanding: ‘The way Britain reacts is not that we crumble or fold but actually you end up invoking the Dunkirk spirit and we fight back… We are one of the great countries of Europe and there comes a point where we say “we’re not prepared to be pushed around, if you’re not serious about a deal then we won’t be either”.’

Immediately after hailing the day of the Brexit referendum in these terms, Farage added: ‘We’ll have done it without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired.’

The point, even in 2012, is the act of unchaining oneself and in order to be unchained it is necessary to have a master to be unchained from.

George Orwell had long ago anticipated it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it essentially exists as Oceania. It is not good news for England, which is now called Airstrip One. Even as pure fantasy, which it is, the Anglo-Saxon Union does not set the pulses racing – liberation from a marginal position in one empire to a marginal position in another is not much of a thrill.

Brexit came to the boil in the midst of a wider turmoil of far-right nationalism. 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.

Where the grand tradition laughs in the face of fear, Brexit had to tap into deep anxiety about the loss of status. 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.

Nigel Lawson, chairman of the Leave campaign, suggested before the referendum, ‘I would be very happy if the Republic of Ireland – I don’t think it’s going to happen – were to say we made a mistake in getting independence in 1922, and come back within the United Kingdom. That would be great.’31

This is Scott-of-the-Azamara-Quest stuff, a hyperbolic inflation of minor inconvenience into epic suffering. As with the Nazi occupation of England, the EU is here playing a pre-scripted role. England needs to think of itself self-pityingly as a colony – therefore it must have a colonizer. If it has been seduced into playing Submissive, somebody has to be playing Dominant.

‘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.

Nothing has actually happened other than a fat, greedy man stealing the food meant for his poor post-partum wife. But from it Johnson draws for his audience a huge conclusion: the NHS must be in part privatized. This is the essential method of what we might call Brexit camp.

‘Camp,’ wrote Susan Sontag, ‘is art that proposes itself seriously, but cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is “too much”.’ But in the camp politics of Brexit, we will come to see a kind of reversal of this procedure: a politics that proposes itself trivially but that has to be taken seriously because its consequences are ‘too much’.

There were precedents on the Tory right, not least in the ghostly figure who hovers unacknowledged over Brexit, Enoch Powell. Powell’s weirdly arch manner and authorship of bad homoerotic poetry gave a strange, knowing theatricality even to his inflammatory racism.

Consider a single word: piccaninnies. When Boris Johnson wrote in 2008 of the Queen, on her visits to Commonwealth countries, being greeted by ‘flag-waving piccaninnies’ with ‘watermelon smiles’3 he was (surely consciously) echoing Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ diatribe, delivered forty years previously, which used the same curiously coy Christy Minstrels term of racist abuse. Powell had spoken of the plight of another elderly English lady: ‘When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.

In this, the roots of Brexit are not in classic reactionary discourse. In general, the far-right doesn’t do irony. Its standard pose is of the utmost seriousness: everything is going to hell and only we (or more usually only I, the strongman) can save it. But this is not the pose of the decadent ruling class whose modes of discourse would shape Brexit’s politics of magnified grievance.

The last thing to note about this speech that launched Johnson’s political career is the most obvious: it is about food. At the heart of the most effective anti-EU stories is oral gratification – and those who would deny it. Brexit’s mythologies are all mouth and stomach.

It is not accidental that the metaphor that shaped official Brexit strategy after the referendum of June 2016 was drawn from the unrestrained consumption of food. In November 2016, a Downing Street aide, Julia Dockerill, was photographed emerging from a Brexit strategy meeting with a handwritten memo that included the note: ‘What’s the model? Have cake and eat it.’

Apart altogether from Boris stealing his father’s jokes with the same abandon with which he stole his wife’s toast, the genealogy of this pun is telling. It is a product both of class privilege and of upper-class Europhilia.

In the annals of Brexit, we must not neglect the part played by the prawn cocktail flavour crisp.

The inflation of language is striking. Exotic flavours of crisps are suddenly part of ‘Britain’s heritage’, on a par with Stonehenge, Shakespeare and the six wives of Henry VIII.

The others picked up on complaints from the British crisp manufacturers that limiting the use of artificial sweeteners would interfere with their right to lavish E numbers on growing children. But while they wrote about the threat to ‘multi-flavoured potato crisps’, Johnson picked on a single flavour: prawn cocktail.

The fact that there was no ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp (it is still freely available over the counter) was no impediment to the foam-flecked hymns of hate. On the contrary, being pure fiction made the story beautifully elastic. Like the tale of Marina’s toast, this tiny seed of grievance could blossom into a monstrous oppression.

But while this may appeal to crisp company executives, the ultra-free market ideology has limited appeal to ordinary voters. The story works only if it can be hyped up even further into the politics of self-pity.

The high point of British camp came in 1915 when the actor Ernest Thesiger (later to star in the camp classic The Bride of Frankenstein) returned from fighting on the Western Front and was asked at a society party what it was like to be a soldier in the Battle of Ypres: ‘Oh my dear, the noise! And the people!’

Another of the architects of Brexit, Michael Gove, says poorer people eat fatty food because it gives them ‘comfort, solace and pleasure’.27 Solace for what? For the destruction of their lives by neoliberalism?

Great quote

Perhaps the most brilliant linguistic manoeuvre of English neoliberalism was the renaming of the welfare state as the nanny state. The helping hand was transformed at a stroke into a pointing finger. The things that enabled people to be free of drudgery and want were redefined as barriers to their freedom.

In keeping with the camp nature of the whole Brexit discourse, this is a social class drag act. It is striking that the two most crucial figures in the creation of Brexit, Johnson and Nigel Farage, are upper-middle-class men (one a well-heeled columnist, the other a stockbroker turned European political fat cat) posing through oral consumption as lumpen proletarian lads.

This is where a very short journey ends, from the Brussels bureaucrat who thinks children shouldn’t eat too many crisps being an intolerable busybody to calling the police on the English parents who let them do so; from embracing childhood obesity as a patriotic cause to condemning it as child abuse; from encouraging the poor to think of consumption as freedom to make them do it. Call the police.

One great binding agent was ‘Anarchy in the UK’, the sheer joy of being able to fuck everything up. Boris Johnson, who used The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ as the theme song for his successful campaign to be mayor of London, also chose the same band’s version of ‘Pressure Drop’ on Desert Island Discs in October 2005.

On that programme, in a rare moment of self-reflection, Johnson spoke of the pleasure of making trouble that motivated his mendacity: ‘so everything I wrote from Brussels, I found was sort of chucking these rocks over the garden wall and I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory party, and it really gave me this I suppose rather weird sense of power’.

Great quote

Aside from these affinities between Tory anarchism and punk nihilism, there are two deeper ways in which being a punk in the 1970s might have prepared you to be a Leave voter in 2016. One is that punk was actually a brilliant, unexpected and thrilling reinvention from the bottom up of the English cult of heroic failure.

The English generation that was shaped by punk thus absorbed more than a renewed and radically re-energized idea of heroic failure.

It also moved away from evidence-based economics – the German-led austerity drive after 2008 was impervious to the realities of its own failure.

There are now 123 million people in the EU at risk of poverty – a quarter of the EU population. This has been allowed to happen because the fear of social and political chaos went out of the system.

There is a European technocratic elite (especially in unaccountable institutions like the European Central Bank) that has lost its memory. It has forgotten that poverty, inequality, insecurity and a sense of powerlessness have drastic political repercussions.

Working-class communities in England, like their counterparts in most of the EU, are absolutely right to feel that they have been abandoned.

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. But it’s still self-harm.

They want to sever the last restraints on the very market forces that have caused the pain. They offer a jagged razor of incoherent English nationalism to distressed and excluded communities and say, ‘Go on, cut yourself, it feels good.’

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:

Johnson had no strategy, no tactics, no serious intent at all. And for a very good reason – Leave was not supposed to win.

He also had no idea of the actual consequences of leaving the EU.

As the historian Richard Evans pointed out in his review in the New Statesman, the question that hovered over all of Johnson’s descriptions of Churchill was ‘who is this meant to remind you of?’

He embodied 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.