Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

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.

‘Powell’s letter-writers speak of student protests, labour unrest, but most of all they speak of the indignities of declining welfare provisions – filled hospital beds and unavailable council houses… concern that immigration could destroy the National Health Service and public housing ran throughout.’30

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.

The pain of colonization and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated.

‘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.

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.

At the most basic level, you cannot expose a naked man: Johnson’s mendacity had never been other than bare-faced and bare-cheeked. He thrived, not in spite of it, but because of it.

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.

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.

The retreat into this metaphor therefore hints at the fundamental tension in Brexit – the profound differences in the self-interest and ideology of its leadership on the one hand, and the actual interests of their working-class followers on the other.

In some parts of England, the embrace of an exclusively English identity is overwhelming: 70 per cent in the North East, 66 per cent in the North West, Yorkshire and the East Midlands.7 By contrast, only 37 per cent of Londoners chose ‘English only’