Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

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.