Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

England, as an idea, terrified me. I knew from history lessons in school that the English only ever did bad things to Irish people. And I knew that the heart of that badness was Protestant. There was one true faith, which was, of course, Catholic, so England by its very nature was deviant.

Being Irish isn’t something you have to prove – it’s just a matter of fact.

The official Irish culture of my childhood and youth was one that defined Ireland as whatever England was not. England was Protestant; so Catholicism had to be the essence of Irish identity. England was industrial; so Ireland had to make a virtue of its underdeveloped and deindustrialized economy. England was urban; so Ireland had to create an image of itself that was exclusively rustic. The English were scientific rationalists; so we Irish had to be the mystical dreamers of dreams. They were Anglo-Saxons; we were Celts. They had a monarchy, so we had to have a republic. They developed a welfare state; so we relied on the tender mercies of charity. In other words, I know exactly what an either/or identity looks and feels like.

Self-pity thus combines two things that may seem incompatible: a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority.

The incoherence of the new English nationalism that lies behind Brexit is that it wants to be both simultaneously. On the one hand, Brexit is fuelled by fantasies of ‘Empire 2.0’, a reconstructed global mercantilist trading empire in which the old white colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs to imagine that it is a revolt against intolerable oppression. It therefore requires both a sense of superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can bring them together.

The power of Brexit is that it promised to end at last all this tantalizing uncertainty by fusing these contradictory moods into a single emotion – the pleasurable self-pity in which one can feel at once horribly hard done by and exceptionally grand. Its promise is, at heart, a liberation, not from Europe, but from the torment of an eternally unresolved conflict between superiority and inferiority.

So, besides grandiosity and gloom, there was always intellectual indolence. It is important to keep this in mind because it is a strain in English public discourse about Europe that would never go away. It was in part a tic of the class system: it doesn’t do for a fellow to seem to care very much about anything.

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.

‘If,’ Harris wrote in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition in 2012, ‘there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.’2

‘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.

in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European Monetary System being introduced by the EU was ‘all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe… I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly. … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.’

It helped that the tiny Falklands population that was serving this microcosmic function was almost entirely white – a ‘British people’ that no longer existed – and that this ‘British territory’ was an almost entirely rural landscape. 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 Falklands was literally pastoral – home to 400,000 sheep and their shepherds – and a weird version of J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Shire, itself in turn an imaginary rustic England threatened by power-mad fascistic invaders.

Without the collective anguish of forced penetration, it would have no underlying collective life at all. Thatcher’s cry – ‘All over Britain, men and women are asking – why can’t we achieve in peace what we can do so well in war?’ – is haunted by the most obvious answer: we can’t. And as the subsequent failures of British military power in Iraq and Afghanistan would show, it was not just war that was needed to reassure Britain that it had a meaningful collective existence, it was the idea of invasion and submission.

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.

England’s favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, tells us that Triumph and Disaster are essentially indistinguishable, ‘two impostors just the same’ – a dangerous lesson for a country whose future hangs on the ability to tell the difference. But it also enjoins the English to ‘lose, and start again at your beginnings/ And never breathe a word about your loss’. Losing everything – even life itself – and not whining about it is the traditional English ideal of courage. As Barczewski has it ‘the highest form of English heroism is stoicism in the face of failure’.

at Khartoum, another fiasco that quickly became a byword for heroism in the face of inevitable disaster: Brexit is imperial England’s last last stand. There is the suicidal cavalry charge: the Brexiteers in the heady early days of 2017, threatening Europe that if it does not play nice they will destroy its economic artillery with their flashing sabres. And there is the doomed expedition without a map into a terra incognita that is also a promised land. Yet as heroic exits go, it is not like that of Captain Oates. The difficulty lies with the question of transference – what is being transferred to whom? In its prime, the cult was, in many ways, the ultimate colonial appropriation. Britain took to itself, not just the resources of the conquered people, but their suffering and endurance. In its Brexit iteration, it has to take this much further: to imagine the greatest colonial power in modern history as itself a colony.

Hundreds camped in the “Occupy London” protests outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the autumn of 2011.’23 At the heart of this malaise is the rather dimly perceived connection between loss of Empire and the sustainability of the United Kingdom: ‘Britain once ruled the Empire on which the sun never set. Now it can barely keep England and Scotland together.’ In this self-pitying mood, there is final reversal of colonial stereotypes.

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.

Emotionally, Brexit is fuelled by anxiety. Asked on the eve of the referendum how EU membership made them feel, voters were given a list of eight words, four positive (happy, hopeful, confident, proud) and four negative (angry, uneasy, disgusted, afraid) and invited to choose up to four of them. Feelings of ‘unease’ dominated, with 44 per cent selecting this word, as against just 26 per cent who went for the most popular positive term, ‘hopeful’. No other positive word was selected by more than 14 per cent. Overall, just 32 per cent chose one or more positive words, while fully 50 per cent chose one or more negative words. Twice as many felt angry as felt happy.28

To the extent that the Brexiteers thought at all about Ireland, it was to suggest that any problems with the Irish border could be solved by the obvious solution of Ireland rejoining the UK. 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.’

‘The white working class are redrawn,’ as Schofield writes, ‘as victims of a traitorous state… This was, he insisted, an invasion not unlike that which was threatened in 1940.’

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.

George Orwell, trying to explain the English character in 1944, wrote, ‘The difference in habits, and especially in food and language, makes it very hard for English working people to get on with foreigners. Their diet differs a great deal from that of any European nation, and they are extremely conservative about it. As a rule, they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish. They regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.’7

Objectively, the great mystery of Brexit is the bond it created between working-class revolt on the one side and upper-class self-indulgence on the other.

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. It is like Noam Chomsky’s famous example of a sentence that conforms to the structure of a grammatical assertion without being a statement of anything at all: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. It is not even false – its truth content is zero.

is a release, not from the real anguish of life in deindustrialized communities, but from the phantom agony inflicted by the long campaign to make the English think of themselves as Submissives to the EU’s Dominant.

Even as a game of chance, however, Brexit is especially odd. It is a surreal casino in which the high-rollers are playing for pennies at the blackjack tables while the plebs are stuffing their life savings into the slot machines. For those who can afford risk, there is very little on the table; for those who cannot, entire livelihoods are at stake. 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: if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way.

But for many of those who voted Leave, the intention surely was only to blow the doors off. The referendum was an opportunity to vent a general rage at the Establishment, much of it justified. It was a free flying kick at the well-upholstered bums. But instead of being a controlled explosion of anger, it sent the whole vehicle of state skywards. Brexit just has too much gelignite packed into it – its destructive energy is not properly contained because it is, in part, misplaced.

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’. It might be truer to say in the early twenty-first century that English intellectuals were ashamed, not of their nationality, but of their nationalism. 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. The most dramatic evolution of national identity in Britain in the last two decades is the resurfacing of the idea of England as a distinct political community.

What was happening from the turn of the century onwards, therefore, was a secession with no clear idea of what was to be seceded from. Just one in five English people now consented to their current form of governance, but, as Anthony Barnett has articulated so well, they had no way to opt out of it: ‘Unable to exit Britain, the English did the next-best thing and told the EU to fuck off.’17

And the overthrow of an imaginary oppressor cannot amount to an act of national liberation.

To take a simple and symbolic example, the Brexiteers and their cheerleaders in the press would make much of the idea of restoring the blue-covered ‘British passport’ as an icon of independent identity. But asked in 2011 what nationality they would have on their passport if they could choose, fully 40 per cent of English respondents chose English.23 There is good reason to think that these are the people who voted most enthusiastically for Brexit. 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.