Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

This mentality is by no means exclusive to the Right. There is a long leftist tradition of seeing continental slavishness as a threat to English liberty, and of imagining England as the only green and pleasant land in which the new Jerusalem could be built.

‘An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea’ – TURKISH PROVERB

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

Over the past twenty-five years, the English have built up a national grudge – perhaps due to disappointed expectations after winning the War – and now it is so firmly established that the country resembles one of those Strindbergian households where everybody nags and tries to make everybody else miserable. On the other hand, the Germans at the end of the War had the same advantage as Britain at the beginning – of facing a crisis situation that left no room for resentment or petulance. The result was the German economic recovery. Meanwhile, like spoilt children, the English sit around scowling and quarrelling, and hoping for better times.

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.6

Ah well. even in 1955 Britain "knew" best.

As Wheen has pointed out, ‘In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970… a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five.’27 Thus, on either side of the momentous decision to join the European project, Britain was in crisis mode. These five national emergencies may have planted the seeds of one of the tropes that would surface in the coming decades and flower in Brexit: the idea that Britain was, in some way, still at war.

This left a vacancy, which was filled by the European Union. A particular irony is that the scapegoating of the EU as the eternal source of England’s ills was facilitated in part by one of the more progressive developments in British culture: the gradual marginalization of open racism. ‘Brussels,’ as Richard Weight puts it, ‘replaced Brixton as the whipping boy of British nationalists.’

This is one possible answer to the deflationary sensation so perfectly captured in a question mark in Jane Gardam’s novel of the dissolution of the Raj, Old Filth: ‘When empires end, there’s often a dazzling finale – then—?’31 Well, perhaps empires don’t quite end when you think they do. Perhaps they have a final moment of zombie existence. This may be the last stage of imperialism – having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.

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. It is not enough for the Europeans that they get to whip you – they have to torture you with paperwork as well:

The novel comes complete with its own legal apparatus, its sadomasochistic treaty of accession: ‘The Dominant and Submissive enter into this contract on the Commencement Date fully aware of its nature and undertake to abide by its conditions without exception.’ Clause 15, paragraph 13 is the secret clause of the European treaties that the Brexiteers always knew was there but could never read before: ‘15.13 The Submissive accepts the Dominant as her master, with the understanding that she is now the property of the Dominant, to be dealt with as the Dominant pleases during the Term generally but specifically during the Allotted Times and any additional agreed allotted times.’

The political erotics of imaginary domination and imaginary submission are the deep pulse of the Brexit psychodrama. Wherein lies the vicarious thrill of imagining a wealthy, relatively successful twenty-first-century European country as a marionette controlled by a continental puppeteer? 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 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. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history.

‘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.

The novel is set in Germany and the main characters are German. There is nothing of significance to say about England twenty years after its surrender. Except, that is, that it is part of a European Union: In the West, twelve nations – Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.8

Subtle.

Had she been able to see into the future, she might have pointed out that she was previewing her successors’ plans for a possible no-deal Brexit.

Why do we have to be invaded in order to exist as a collective entity? It is a remarkable question for the leader of a state that had not in fact been successfully invaded since it was formed in 1707, and of an island that had not suffered any serious external invasion since 1066? Implied in the question is an existential terror: without invasion do ‘we’ really exist at all? In this light, novels like SS-GB and Fatherland are not just masochistic fantasies, they are symptoms of a much deeper pathology in which pain is an existential necessity.

This is why it did not disappear after the apparently conclusive decision of 1975. 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. Yet it came to be construed as a replay of the Second World War, a lurid example of the interaction between shame, scapegoating and self-pity.

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. He found a way to argue both that the ‘war’ with Germany was entirely phoney and that it was nonetheless worth continuing because it was somehow in Europe’s best interests. While conceding ‘The reality is that we have more in common with the Germans than with any other European people’, Ferguson managed to conclude that ‘bad Anglo-German relations were (paradoxically) a good thing. To be precise: it would really be rather bad for everyone else in Europe if Britain and Germany did strike up a firm alliance.’

At least the Nazis could have been, in Churchill’s great and galvanic rhetoric, fought on the beaches, hills, fields and streets. They offered the ‘chance to fight back’. The new German invasion, cloaked in the guise of peaceful co-operation, is more damnable because it does not give the English Resistance a proper physical target.

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.

you’ve thrilled yourself with these dark imaginings you end with the ultimate in wish-fulfilment: the EU is a front for a German cabal and this will save Brexit. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers. For some of those at the top of the Labour Party, the idea of the EU as a mere front for the bosses and moguls of Europe was a reason to be secretly pleased that Brexit would allow Britain to escape their clutches and build socialism in one country.

BMW means Brexit Made Wonderful.

This desire to experience the vicarious thrills of humiliation is possible only in a country that did not know what national humiliation is really like. But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled. In the Brexit negotiations, the idea of national humiliation moved from fiction to reality. There was a strange ecstasy of shame: ‘Britain faces a terrible choice: between the humiliation of a deal dictated by Brussels; and the chaos of crashing out of the EU’

With Brexit, England would experience the consequences of not being careful what you wish for.

His second expedition in 1845 was deeply Brexitlike. As Barczewski explains, it was undertaken in a spirit of blithe optimism: ‘Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners.’4 If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in unmapped wastelands, it may be because the same attitudes have been at work.

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.’

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.

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.

The quisling theme was also endemic in the revolt against black and Asian migrants. Immigration was proof that a treacherous elite was selling out the victory of the war. ‘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.’

One genuinely distinctive aspect of Englishness had long been a decidedly uncontinental taste in food. 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.’

The great Marxist historian of England, E. P. Thompson, writing in the Sunday Times in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, gave this disgust an explicitly anti-Common Market turn, brilliantly fusing English puritanism with anti-capitalist politics: ‘It is about the belly. A market is about consumption. The Common Market is conceived of as a distended stomach: a large organ with various traps, digestive chambers and fiscal acids, assimilating a rich diet of consumer goods… This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London.’8

Returning from a summit in Paris three months after the referendum, Wilson ‘proudly announced that he has saved Britain from the horrors of the “Euroloaf” and “Eurobeer”. “An imperial pint is good enough for me and for the British people, and we want it to stay that way.”’11 Wilson undoubtedly knew that this was nonsense, but he also knew, as Johnson would discover, that it was the kind of nonsense that sold well. The British had an insatiable appetite for every kind of Euromenace to their food and drink.

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 German nationality of the commissioner Martin Bangemann allows the story to become another episode of Anglo-German conflict (‘der crunch’) – like two world wars. And in Taylor’s rent-a-quote comment, there is a double act of hyping. A packet of crisps becomes a thing that ‘affects your life’, and the alleged assault on the right to produce and consume it in strange varieties is the demolition of democracy. There is no point in voting at all because some bloke in Brussels will just decide what you can and cannot eat.

For reasons that may puzzle anthropologists long into the future, the prawn cocktail – a few (hopefully unfrozen) crustaceans placed in a glass on a bed of shredded lettuce, smothered in a pink Marie Rose sauce and sprinkled with paprika had become the quintessential English idea of fine dining.

As he confessed in 2002, ‘Some of my most joyous hours have been spent in a state of semi-incoherence, composing foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp.’20 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.

The conspicuous consumption of unhealthy things is not marginal to the appeal of Brexit. It is a literal embodiment of rebellion against the bullies who tell us what to do, the ‘clever people’ who think they know better than the real people. Brexit marches on its distended stomach.

The deprivation of the English right to junk food was clearly a criminal matter.

Lydon described the pleasures of wearing these bondage suits as a kind of self-abnegation: ‘You put that on, and basically you’re insulting yourself, but you’re also clearing yourself of all egotism.’

But when the need to compete with alternative ideologies went away after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the EU gradually abandoned its social democratic and Christian Democratic roots.

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. The EU was founded on a kind of constructive pessimism. Behind its drive towards inclusion and equality lay two powerful words: or else. It was an institution that knew that, if things are not held together by a reasonable expectation that life will get better for ordinary people, they will fall apart. In the best sense, the EU itself was a Project Fear. Without that fear, the project became arrogant, complacent and obsessed with grand schemes like the ill-designed euro.

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.

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

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’.

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.

These tennis balls are an early, de luxe version of the prawn cocktail flavour crisp: trivial objects blown up to gigantic proportions as evidence of continental disdain for England and thus transformed in a casus belli. As Jonathan Sumption puts it in his magisterial history of the Hundred Years War, ‘The story of the tennis balls, supposedly sent to Henry V by the Dauphin [not the king] with the message that he would do better to amuse himself at home than to meddle in France, was not just a conceit of Shakespeare’s. Variants of it circulated in Henry’s lifetime. It is a fable, but like many fables it contained a symbolic truth.’

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.

Even the worst Brexit will be nothing like the catastrophe of the Hundred Years War. But there are perhaps two meaningful parallels. One is the power of the big gesture. 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. Brexit is not the Hundred Years War, but unless someone finds a way out of it, the consequences will be felt for a century.

Mass democracy and the concept of citizenship will be left behind: ‘It is… only a matter of time until mass democracy goes the way of its fraternal twin, Communism.’

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.’2 As Gove told the Sun: ‘I love Michael Caine. He’s the kind of expert I like.’

There were many factors at work, but the proximate cause was undoubtedly the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In part, the new English nationalism is thus another example of the dominant power mimicking the gestures of small-nation ‘liberation’ movements – the English were reacting to and mirroring the emergence of a potent and effective Scottish nationalism.