Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

Above all, prawn cocktail flavour crisps could not be restored to the millions of children craving them for the simple reason that they had never ceased to be available.

The point about the whole Borisovian Brussels-bashing project was that it could survive anything except success.

As for his claims that ‘you can’t recycle a teabag’ under EU law, Johnson had to admit that this was in fact a decision taken by Cardiff City Council and was entirely a matter of local jurisdiction.

‘It is not EU regulation at all, is it? In fact it is a Council of Europe convention on the transfer of corpses. In there, there is no reference to coffin weight or dimensions, nor is there any EU legislation, nor is the UK a signatory. The story is a figment of your imagination.’

But once Leave actually won the referendum, this comic universe imploded. Some lies – I am going to ban Muslims and build a wall – can lead to power because they connect, however tenuously, to theoretically possible acts of government. ‘An EU rule that says you can’t recycle a teabag’ connects to nothing.

Donald Trump, for all his monstrosities, fulfils this need for his working-class supporters – objectively they hurt themselves in voting for him but he actually took power and is serious about inflicting pain on their perceived enemies. Without a transfer of power, Brexit confronts an insoluble problem: who is to inflict the pain and who is to feel it most?

The backbench anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry rose to her feet in the Commons in July 2018, eyed her Brexiteer colleagues and let fly: ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted Leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.’ But if that’s not what people voted for, it is emphatically what they got:

When Farage writes of learning to get out when the trade is going wrong and to brush yourself off when the losses start mounting up, he does not mean having the decency to stop and admit that the project is failing. He means that he and his cohorts can always walk away from the wreckage and pretend that their own survival is at best heroic, at worst cause for a good self-deprecating story over several lunchtime pints.

For the working-class voters who were crucial to the Brexit vote, this means that the reality is not so much that they are taking a gamble but rather that they are being gambled with.

Precisely because this belief was unfounded, the expectations of those who voted Leave in the belief that all the immigrants would immediately go home were not and cannot be fulfilled. There is here the downside of the mendacity that fuelled Brexit. You can invent enemies, but then you can’t hurt these figments.

The only enemy open to punishment was thus the enemy within: those who had voted Remain and their political representatives, parliamentarians insisting on the very parliamentary sovereignty that was supposed to be restored by Brexit, judges exercising their professional functions of scrutiny.

On 18 May 2016, a month before the vote, Nigel Farage told the BBC ‘it’s legitimate to say that if people feel they have lost control completely – and we have lost control… then violence is the next step’. But in fact the next step in the overthrow of imaginary oppression was imaginary violence. It was another costume drama, in which May and her government pretended to be the Committee of Public Safety, guardians of the people’s will against traitors and fifth columnists.

But this is not English conservatism – it is pure Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the people express the General Will freely in a majority vote but, once they have done so, dissent is treason. The General Will had been established on that sacred referendum day. And it must not be defied or questioned.

This is why May called a general election in 2017. Her decision to do so – when she had a working majority in Parliament – was not pure vanity. It was the inevitable result of the völkisch rhetoric she had adopted when she told her first Tory Party conference as leader that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’, openly evoking the far-right (and Stalinist) trope of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ who did not deserve citizenship.

The Tories tried to build a personality cult around a woman who doesn’t have much of a personality.

Those words she repeated so robotically, ‘strong and stable’, would ring just as hollow in the mouth of any other Conservative politician. 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. It is as strong as a jellyfish and as stable as a flea.

In the meantime, as an elite form of neurotic escapism, there was one last refuge for self-pity: leave the plebs in their bondage trousers and return to the Middle Ages. A strange word re-entered English public discourse, its sudden presence a reminder that there was still some mileage in the ridiculous at the heart of Brexit’s sublime. That word was vassalage: ‘the state or condition of a vassal; subordination, homage or allegiance characteristic of or resembling that of a vassal’.34

There is a thing that emerging nationalisms do. Since recent history is always full of compromises, complexities and contradictions, they seek out a version of the past that is not history but myth. They imagine themselves back into an aboriginal Dreamtime of gods and demigods.

And at its most elite levels Brexit takes refuge in its own English Dreamtime. Partly, this is a medieval time of ‘vassalage’ and marauding knights, a time, in the words of Britannia Unchained’s fantasy of liberated ultra-capitalism, ‘when nearly all society’s strictures are relaxed’. But it has, even beyond that, its own world of gods and demigods. What we have to understand is that these gods are the super-rich.

The moment of the referendum does not have a clear meaning – it is almost immediately lost in contention and confusion. But neither does ‘England’. It emerges as a divided thing, bitterly split, not just between Leavers and Remainers but between the England of the big multi-cultural cities on the one side and the England of the villages and towns on the other. And so Brexit must inevitably exit its own condition, into mythological time. And it must acknowledge the true gods: the gods of international capital.

if restoring sovereignty to Westminster and the British courts is the point of the exercise, why does the rhetoric of Brexit so quickly resolve itself into hysterical attacks on the exercise of this very sovereignty by Parliament and the Supreme Court?

His jest will savour but of shallow wit When thousands more weep than did laugh at it.3 The same might be said for Brexit, another upper-class jest that will end with more tears than laughter, and another upper-class adventure in inflicting pain to toughen up England.

Rees-Mogg described the White Paper as representing ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’.5 (The Hundred Years War may in fact have been too modern for him.)

Its overall effects are summarized by Jonathan Sumption: ‘In England, it brought intense effort and suffering, a powerful tide of patriotism, great fortune succeeded by bankruptcy, disintegration and utter defeat.’11 A perfect preview of the long-term effects of Brexit, at least for the masses:

When Lucas complained, Johnson was fired. But his career was launched. He was immediately hired by the Daily Telegraph as its correspondent in Brussels where his talent for lurid invention came into its own. The moral of the story for ambitious Tories was clear enough: making stuff up about fourteenth-century England is a good career move.

For in England’s very long history as a nation state – much longer than most current political entities can claim – there is just one episode that is more thoroughly unhinged than Brexit. The Hundred Years War is one of the great criminal follies of European history: repeated English invasions of France that unleashed on innocent civilians mass murder, mass rape, theft on a staggering scale and an orgy of destruction. It brought nothing but horror and misery. And all in the failed pursuit of a mad idea rooted in elite concerns with face and honour.

Edward needed the support of the Flemings, but they were also feudal subjects of the French monarchy. They couldn’t support him unless he declared that he was in fact King of France. So he did. This raises, though, one of the great problems of Brexit: saving face. People – and states – don’t act merely out of self-interest. There are times when they make claims they know to be daft, but they can’t find a way to back down.

But neither Edward nor his successors could find the right means to step down from the platform that he constructed in Ghent in 1340. The consequences were appalling. The repeated invasions of France cost English lives and sucked up English resources. They disrupted and at times destroyed the trade with Flanders and France that had been so important to the English economy. The insatiable demand for taxation to pay for them very nearly destroyed the English state in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

The fabulous English military victories at Crécy and Agincourt, at Sluys and Poitiers, did not end the war. As Jonathan Sumption puts it, they simply ‘underlined the essential unimportance of battles as a means of achieving anything of long-term significance’.

The English state could not hold conquered territory for long or sustain a large standing army. Its solution was one that would appeal to most of the free-market ultras behind Brexit: the war was privatized and outsourced to gangsters, for whom, truly, ‘nearly all society’s strictures are relaxed’.

The English claim to the throne of France and the grand rhetoric of Brexit’s revival of the glorious Englishness of Agincourt are bold and thrilling as well as being bonkers – they stir the blood even while they numb the brain. The other is that these grand gestures are far easier to make than to unmake. It is astonishing how much pain people will suffer and inflict rather than admit they made a mistake.

Gaunt’s geography is strangely out of kilter. And so is Shakespeare’s history. When the actual people of England rose up in the Peasants’ Revolt, John of Gaunt was at the top of their hit list. He was Jean of Ghent, as in the city that is now part of Belgium. He was a French-speaking Plantagenet who spent much of his time in Aquitaine and became, for fifteen years, titular King of Castile.

For most of those who voted for it, Brexit means a ‘return to the nation state’. But for many of those behind it, there is a very different ideal. They use this language because it is the only one that is politically viable. But for them the exit from the EU is really a prelude to the exit from the nation state into a world where the rich are truly free because they are truly stateless.

Crucial in this dystopian/utopian vision is the idea of exit. Rees-Mogg senior wrote that even in the early stages of this new age ‘many residents of the largest and most powerful Western nation-states, like their counterparts in East Berlin in 1989, will be plotting to find their way out… abandoning the country of their birth is not [an] unthinkable decision’.

In the mid-1990s, a giant sheep station at the southern tip of the North Island was purchased by a conglomerate whose major shareholders included Davidson and Rees-Mogg.

England was not involved in tedious, complex and inevitably disappointing negotiations in order to find the least worst compromise and make the best of a very bad job. It was being insulted. It demanded cake and Barnier sent it tennis balls. 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. Rees-Mogg suggested that the rewards of Brexit might be fully apparent in fifty years’ time, but, given his expansive sense of history, why not make it a hundred? Or, as happens in Dreamtime, in the long never-never. 7.

It helped, perhaps, that Caine himself is an enthusiastic Brexiteer, a multimillionaire who declares that poverty is more noble for other Britons than subjection to the EU’s ‘faceless dictators’: ‘I voted for Brexit. I’d rather be a poor master than a rich servant.

While Irish, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms had long histories of political, artistic and cultural expression, English nationalism was largely left to its own devices.

Early in the Second World War, George Orwell claimed in his survey of Englishness, The Lion and the Unicorn, that ‘England is perhaps the only great country where intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality’.

English nationalism, not without reason, was seen as the property of skinheads, racists, football hooligans and drunken squaddies. A history of violence, domination and xenophobia made it radioactive. But it did not make it go away.

what George Orwell wrote in the 1940s – ‘Hostile or friendly, nearly all the generalisations that are made about England base themselves on the property-owning class and ignore the other forty-five million’6 – was scarcely less true sixty years later.

Anarchic rebellions are often like this – the peasants can’t storm the castle and kill the lords, so they take it out on the petty clerks and the Jews and the foreign shopkeepers. Deeply disaffected with Westminster and Whitehall, England-without-London unleashed its fury on Brussels and Strasbourg.

Here we see one of the paradoxes and contradictions of Brexit itself. It is driven by a force – English nationalism – that its leaders still refuse to articulate. It draws on English disengagement from the Union, but wraps itself in a brashly reasserted Unionism.

But he was also aware that ‘this gentleness of manners is a recent thing’ and that ‘well within living memory… an eminent jurist, asked to name a typically English crime, could answer “Kicking your wife to death”.’

Whatever happens with Brexit, this toxic sludge will be in England’s political groundwater for a long time. The self-pity of Lost Causism will meld with the rage of betrayal. Without the EU as whipping boy and scapegoat, there will be no end of blame and no shortage of candidates to be saddled with it: anyone and everyone except the Brexiteers themselves. That most virulent of poisons, the ‘stab-in-the-back’, is in the bloodstream now and it will work its harm for a long time.

There is surely, in one of the world’s great cultures, enough wit and energy and creativity and humour to infuse Englishness with hope and joy instead of pain and self-pity.