THREE
YEARS
IN HELL
Meanwhile Back at the Ranch
White Savage
A Traitor’s Kiss
Ship of Fools
Enough is Enough
Judging Shaw
Heroic Failure
FINTAN
O’TOOLE
THREE
YEARS
IN HELL
This is an Apollo book, first published in the UK in 2020 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Fintan O’Toole, 2020
The moral right of Fintan O’Toole to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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ISBN (HB): 9781838937836
ISBN (XTPB): 9781838935207
ISBN (E): 9781838935221
Cover Designer: R. Fresson
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By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction: Before the Golden Age
Acknowledgements
Prelude: 22 May 2011
2016
TIMELINE
18 JUNE 2016
21 JUNE 2016
24 JUNE 2016
24 JUNE 2016
24 JUNE 2016
1 JULY 2016
2 JULY 2016
12 JULY 2016
21 OCTOBER 2016
2017
TIMELINE
17 JANUARY 2017
23 FEBRUARY 2017
21 MARCH 2017
28 MARCH 2017
18 APRIL 2017
6 JUNE 2017
9 JUNE 2017
10 JUNE 2017
13 JUNE 2017
17 JUNE 2017
8 JULY 2017
8 AUGUST 2017
15 AUGUST 2017
16 AUGUST 2017
29 AUGUST 2017
29 AUGUST 2017
23 SEPTEMBER 2017
26 SEPTEMBER 2017
12 NOVEMBER 2017
14 NOVEMBER 2017
5 DECEMBER 2017
8 DECEMBER 2017
9 DECEMBER 2017
2018
TIMELINE
13 FEBRUARY 2018
20 FEBRUARY 2018
25 FEBRUARY 2018
27 FEBRUARY 2018
3 MARCH 2018
6 MARCH 2018
28 APRIL 2018
26 MAY 2018
29 MAY 2018
12 JUNE 2018
TIMELINE
10 JULY 2018
14 JULY 2018
28 JULY 2018
31 JULY 2018
TIMELINE
15 SEPTEMBER 2018
22 SEPTEMBER 2018
29 SEPTEMBER 2018
6 OCTOBER 2018
16 OCTOBER 2018
TIMELINE
6 NOVEMBER 2018
13 NOVEMBER 2018
17 NOVEMBER 2018
19 NOVEMBER 2018
20 NOVEMBER 2018
24 NOVEMBER 2018
27 NOVEMBER 2018
11 DECEMBER 2018
15 DECEMBER 2018
16 DECEMBER 2018
22 DECEMBER 2018
2019
TIMELINE
5 JANUARY 2019
8 JANUARY 2019
15 JANUARY 2019
18 JANUARY 2019
22 JANUARY 2019
TIMELINE
12 FEBRUARY 2019
19 FEBRUARY 2019
16 MARCH 2019
19 MARCH 2019
23 MARCH 2019
26 MARCH 2019
TIMELINE
6 APRIL 2019
9 APRIL 2019
7 MAY 2019
4 JUNE 2019
11 JUNE 2019
14 JUNE 2019
18 JUNE 2019
25 JUNE 2019
2 JULY 2019
9 JULY 2019
17 JULY 2019
17 JULY 2019
20 JULY 2019
23 JULY 2019
TIMELINE
25 JULY 2019
27 JULY 2019
10 AUGUST 2019
13 AUGUST 2019
3 SEPTEMBER 2019
7 SEPTEMBER 2019
1 OCTOBER 2019
3 OCTOBER 2019
5 OCTOBER 2019
15 OCTOBER 2019
18 OCTOBER 2019
30 OCTOBER 2019
2 NOVEMBER 2019
5 NOVEMBER 2019
7 DECEMBER 2019
Envoi
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
In memory of Mary O’Toole Byrne (1961–2019)
‘I have been sometimes thinking, if a man had the art of second sight for seeing lies… how admirably he might entertain himself in this town, by observing the different shapes, sizes, and colours of those swarms of lies which buzz about the heads of some people like flies about a horse’s ears in summer.’
JONATHAN SWIFT, ‘The Art of Political Lying’,
The Examiner, 9 November 1710
Early in the morning of 13 December 2019, Boris Johnson made his victory speech. He had used the simple thirteen-letter slogan ‘Get Brexit Done’ to transform the electoral map. Parts of the English Midlands and North where people used to think the official name of Johnson’s party was Tory Scum had abandoned generations of loyalty to Labour and voted Conservative. Johnson had been given a parliamentary majority comfortable enough to ensure that he would, albeit in a very limited sense, get Brexit done. The United Kingdom would formally cease to be a member of the European Union on 31 January 2020. Something was certainly coming to an end. It was just not entirely clear what that something was.
Speaking at what he bathetically called ‘this glorious, glorious pre-breakfast moment’ (food is never far from his mind) Johnson could not contain his sense of wonder. He had managed, as he put it, to unite the nation ‘from Woking to Workington; from Kensington… to Clwyd South; from Surrey Heath to Sedgefield; from Wimbledon to Wolverhampton’. Johnson can never resist an alliterative litany and this list of new and old Tory heartlands was no doubt shaped by the demands of his favourite rhetorical device. Yet in his euphoria he seems not to have noticed that seven of the eight constituencies he namechecked are in England. He could have achieved the same assonance with ‘from Dumfries [in Scotland] to Don Valley’ or from ‘Brecon [in Wales] to Bolsover’, an eternal Labour seat in the English Midlands that had miraculously passed to the Tories. But he didn’t.
Johnson had, in a real sense, created a new country. Ever since Elizabeth Gaskell’s classic novel of 1854, North and South, it has been a commonplace to speak and write of the two parts of England as if they were different countries. In the novel, the Hales, father and daughter, are to move from Helstone in the South to Milton in the North. Mr Hale explains to Margaret that in this move they would encounter ‘people and scenes so different that I shall never be reminded of Helstone’. Margaret reflects: ‘It would be different. Discordant as it was – with almost a detestation for all she had ever heard of the North of England, the manufacturers, the people, the wild and bleak country – there was this one recommendation – it would be different from Helstone, and could never remind them of that beloved place.’1 The language would be the same if the Hales were embarking for Australia or India rather than merely moving a few hundred miles up the road.
Ever since, the notion of North and South as two different countries in everything but name has been a commonplace of English culture, reinforced by tangible differences in the economy, in wages, in educational levels, in political loyalties and even in such English institutions as fish and chips (cod in the South; haddock in the North). In the language of the 2019 general election, the term ‘Red Wall’ – referring to the almost geological bedrock of Labour-voting seats in the North – was repeated almost as often as ‘Get Brexit Done’. It conjured an image of invasion and repulsion, as if, in addition to the old Roman fortification Hadrian’s Wall, which roughly defined England’s external boundary with Scotland, there were also this great political barricade running through England itself.
And Johnson completely overran it. He did, up a point, unite Wimbledon, where zero per cent of local districts are defined as ‘highly deprived’ and Wolverhampton North East, where 27 per cent of them are so defined. The great political power of Brexit always lay in its ability to bring together, in one common gesture of defiance, much of the rich upper class – including the dilettante faux aristocracy to which Johnson belongs – and much of the white working class. The anti-state anarchism of the hedge fund caste was fused with the anti-Establishment rage of the post-industrial untouchables. Johnson proved in 2019 that the power unleashed when these two wires crossed was undiminished – it could burn through long-established political and social identities.
So it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Johnson had accidentally created a new country. He deserves, perhaps, to be called the father of the nation. The only problem is that neither he nor anyone else knows what this new country is. It is certainly not, as Johnson’s triumphant speech acknowledged by omission, the United Kingdom: Scotland and Northern Ireland rejected Brexit even more emphatically in the election of 2019 than they had done in the referendum of 2016 and a clear majority of voters in the UK as a whole voted in 2019 for parties that promised a second referendum and an opportunity to stay in the EU. It is not even, properly speaking, England: it includes much of Wales (Johnson did remember to namecheck Clwyd South) but excludes Greater London which voted emphatically against Johnson and Brexit.
The eerie thing is not just that this new country is nameless but that so, too, is its great unifying cause. The cause is Brexit but Brexit, in Johnson’s successful framing of it, is ‘done’, over, gone. It has vanished. It happened already and it is not to be spoken of now. The Huffington Post reported shortly after the election that the word ‘Brexit’ was to be officially removed from public discourse, with the disbandment of the Department for Exiting the European Union and the renaming of the Brexit press team as the ‘Europe and economy’ unit. The anonymous country would thus have an anonymous national mission to bind it together. This seems an appropriate outcome for a project in which an unacknowledged force (English nationalism) was channelled into an undefined transformation (a Brexit that had no realistic relationship to an achievable reality). While Johnson liked to talk of ‘this pivotal moment in our national story’, there was neither a settled nation nor a clear story.2
This is the great paradox of the whole saga: Brexit can achieve the impossible; it’s just the possible it has trouble with. It has done incredible things: shattered deeply rooted identities, united the have-nots with the have-yachts, abolished the political distinction between North and South in England, made Johnson – a figure whom almost nobody regards as honest, competent or sincere – into one of the most consequential national leaders in English history. But it struggles with the credible ones. Neither before nor after the referendum of June 2016 did its leading proponents come up with any serious plan for what Brexit would really mean in practice for Britain’s economy, for its place in the world, for its very existence as a unitary state.
An aspect of this paradox is that Brexit is, on the one hand, unquestionably historic – but it is not, in the imaginations of its proponents, history. It is not an event that is unfolding in the 2020s, amid all the other realities of the time: climate change, Donald Trump, runaway technological transformations and so on. It is, rather, a flight from history. It is both literally and metaphorically escapist – the great leap out of the EU is also a giant bound out of the real, compromised, messy truths of the world in which Britain, alongside everyone else, finds itself. Into what can it escape? Only that last refuge of bankrupt utopians, the Golden Age.
A perfect little dramatisation of this clash between historic moment and ahistoric fantasy is an exchange in the House of Commons on 17 October 2019. The Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts asked the leader of the House and arch-Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg to ‘do everything in his power to ensure that impact assessments are published and available for Members to see’ before they voted on the withdrawal agreement that Johnson had negotiated with the EU. Rees-Mogg replied: ‘There are any number of impact assessments that people have made, but let me give her my assessment of what will happen when we leave the European Union: it will be a golden age for the United Kingdom when we are free of the heavy yoke of the European Union, which has bowed us down for generations and made us less competitive, less efficient and higher-cost. All of that will be gone, and we will be singing hallelujahs.’3
This might be dismissed as mere facetiousness, but the Golden Age is a repeated point of reference for the Brexiteers, including Johnson. The peroration of his first major speech to the Commons after he became prime minister was: ‘I believe that if we bend our sinews to the task now, there is every chance that in 2050, when I fully intend to be around, although not necessarily in this job, we will be able to look back on this period – this extraordinary period – as the beginning of a new golden age for our United Kingdom.’4 Likewise, in his speech setting out the new government’s plans immediately after the election, he told parliament: ‘I do not think it vainglorious or implausible to say that a new golden age for this United Kingdom is now within reach. In spite of the scoffing, in spite of the negativity, in spite of the scepticism that you will hear from the other side, we will work flat out to deliver it.’5
That this is drivel is a given. What is striking, though, is the weird mixture of registers. Words like ‘implausible’ and ‘work flat out to deliver it’ come from a world of facts and processes. The Golden Age (as Rees-Mogg and Johnson ought to know from their Etonian education) comes from the world of cosmological myth. It is elaborated in Hesiod’s Works and Days as a long-ago era in which people had neither facts nor processes to worry about:
Like gods they lived, with spirits free from care;
And grim old age never encroached. The feast
Where they moved limbs to music never ceased;
Their hands and feet not ageing in the least.
They were free from every evil you could number,
And when death came, it stole on them like slumber.6
The whole point of the Golden Age is that it is outside history. It exists merely as the ideal from which humanity has been expelled forever. After it comes the age in which, as Hesiod has it:
They had no self-control, could not restrain
Themselves from wreaking outrages and pain.7
The ancient poet may not have foreseen the coming of Boris Johnson, but this does serve as fair warning. And Johnson’s evocation of the Golden Age is in fact wonderfully evasive. He does not actually say that it will begin at the moment of Brexit. He says that there is a point in the future (2050) from which it will be possible to look back on 2020 as the moment at which this glorious era was inaugurated. This preserves the essence of the Golden Age – that it is always imagined in retrospect. It also lifts the idea of the fabulous transformation to be wrought by Brexit out of the realm of concrete questions (How many car plants closed? How did the chlorinated chicken go down?) and makes it a matter of future perception – perception, moreover, through the lens of myth and fantasy. Brexit is not a practical proposition to be judged by weighing costs against benefits. It is a sci-fi creation myth: this is how a future generation will understand how its existence came to be so blissful. It is not this generation’s idea of its future; it is the next generation’s idea of its past.
This is madness but it is also method. For the essence of Brexit is that it is impossible to disentangle fantasy from calculation, myth from manoeuvre. One of the stark facts of the great moment of departure in January 2020 is that it was not euphoric. There was no singing of hallelujahs – or, if there was, they were, as Leonard Cohen would have it, cold and broken. Brexit is a nationalist revolution and it strikes the pose of a small oppressed nation breaking the chains of imperial bondage. England, in Rees-Mogg’s terms, is setting itself ‘free of the heavy yoke of the European Union’. But precisely because this is just a pose – a performance in which the old colonial master mimics the gestures of the old colonial subjects – it cannot produce the ecstatic emotions that successful revolutions seek to generate. The real public mood in the month of liberation was revealed in a survey commissioned by the Conservative think-tank Bright Blue: ‘The UK public is fairly pessimistic about the next five years. A majority of the UK public expects levels of undesirable trends – poverty (72%), crime (71%), inequality (71%) and national debt (72%) – to increase or stay the same.’8
This public pessimism is very much in keeping with the shift in the appeal of the Brexit project over the period since the referendum campaign of 2016. In the beginning, it was all gain and no pain – Britain would have all the benefits of EU membership with none of the costs or constraints. Then, as the negotiations dragged on and the political system brought itself close to a state of anarchy, it became all pain. Finally, Johnson came up with a powerful – and in electoral terms highly effective – appeal: I can make the pain go away. But the very allure of the promise to ‘Get Brexit Done’ was in the idea of ‘done’ meaning not just achieved but ‘done with’ – over, finished, dead. It recast the period 2016 to 2019, no longer as a glorious moment of joyful emancipation, but as a bad trip from which everyone had to come down. In the ultimate irony, Brexit had ceased to be a release from the European Union and had become a release from itself. In keeping with the wilfully self-generating nature of the whole episode, the relief had become purely auto-erotic.
And the truth, of course, was that even this release was illusory. Brexit had been reshaped, as Chris Grey put it, as ‘an embarrassing episode at the Christmas office party that it would be bad taste to remind anyone of in the new year’.9 This is why it dare not speak its name any more. Johnson’s rhetoric at the start of 2020 was at one level an appeal for amnesia: let’s forget, not just all the promises we made in 2016, but all the rancour and anarchy they unleashed. Even his culinary metaphors changed. He had promised in the election that Brexit was ‘oven-ready’. Now he revealed that the oven was in fact a microwave in which a prepackaged future could be reheated almost instantly and without thought or effort: ‘That oven-ready deal I talked about so much during the election campaign has already had its plastic covering pierced and been placed in the microwave.’10
It might be noted in passing how bathetic the metaphors have become. The imagery of anti-Europeanism in England has always been related to food – Brexit used to be, in Johnson’s notorious formulation, a fairy-tale cake that could be consumed again and again without ever diminishing. Now we have descended to Pot Noodle Brexit: Johnson will stick it in the microwave, the people will eat it and we will all forget about it as soon as we have consumed it. But even this promised junk food does not actually exist. Neither the endless and endlessly tiresome detail of trade negotiations with the EU nor the vast implications for the nature of the UK state can be ‘done’ at the press of a button. Instant disposable Brexit is no more real than fairy-tale cake Brexit. There is almost nothing tangible that the project can offer those who supported it. It is a point of departure, not a place of arrival. And the only place it can arrive is at an imaginary future in whose retrospective glow of approval the tedious journey will seem to have been worth making. That voyage cannot be mapped with facts. There are no impact assessments for the return of the Golden Age.
This is what makes Brexit so strange for journalists to write about. We are supposed to report on facts, on processes, on states pursuing their interests with more or less acumen, more or less success. If you live and work in Ireland, Brexit was indeed like this – there were facts, there were political processes and there was a state that had from very early on a clear sense of where its own interests lay. The story was literally grounded: the snaking, porous 500-kilometre-long border across the island is a place where you can feel political realities beneath your feet. It was also inescapably historic – if anything, too much so. No one in Ireland could think of Brexit through the metaphors the Brexiteers favoured: the clean break, the new age. There are no clean breaks on this island, just slow and delicate efforts to disentangle the present and the future from the worst aspects of the past. History may be, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus puts it, a nightmare from which we are trying to awake, but we know that the best you can hope to wake to is a less nightmarish history.
But facts, processes and interests are not the substance of Brexit itself. The order of priority is different. First came the gesture, then the struggle to say what it is a gesture of. Every commentator on it – and this very much includes the primary participants in it – feels like Mr Jones in Bob Dylan’s ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’: ‘you know something is happening but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr Jones?’ The referendum result was a statement, not of the desired destiny of the United Kingdom, but simply of what non-metropolitan England does not want. It is a big No, a void that has to be filled with content and meaning. The astonishing drama it unleashed – the resignations and elections, the picaresque rise and fall and rise again of one of English history’s greatest chancers, the making and unravelling of agreements, the unprecedented constitutional conflicts between government, parliament and the courts, the surreal chaos in the House of Commons, the apocalyptic no-deal scenarios – has been a thrilling spectacle. But it is a manifestation, not a meaning.
It is said with some justice that to a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail. The hammer in my hand is the one that every Irish person holds – a sense of how nationalism works; a fear of the ways in which, if it is poorly articulated, it can turn toxic; an awareness of the danger of imagining identity as a zero sum game; a fundamental disbelief in the possibility of extracting oneself from history. These are not examples of innate Irish wisdom – to the contrary, they are the fruits of very bitter experience. To look across the water from Ireland is to see people playing with the same fire with which we ourselves have been burned. If much of what follows here seems harsh, it is motivated merely by a hope that our neighbours would not have to learn the hard way what W. B. Yeats learned from the Irish Troubles:
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare,
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love…
What follows here is a sort of real-time reflection on a country trying to find its substance in its enmities, seeking definition in what it does not want to be. If it has value it is not that the reflections are always right, but simply that they are an attempt to understand a historical moment as it is unfolding, without hindsight. It is one improvised, on-the-fly attempt to fill the void with meaning. This is what Brexit felt like to one intimate outsider as it was happening. I tried, in Heroic Failure, to give a panoramic wide shot of the historical and cultural context. This is Brexit frame by frame. Of course, from the perspective of 2050, those looking back on the dawn of the Golden Age will find its tone appalling and its negativity incomprehensible. One can but hope that their scorn is justified by the glorious end of this strange saga.
1 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, Penguin Books, p. 35.
2 Hansard, 25 July 2019, col. 1460.
3 Hansard, 17 October 2019, col. 490.
4 Ibid., 25 July 2019, col. 1460.
5 Ibid., 19 December 2019, col. 45.
6 Hesiod, Works and Days, Penguin Books, Kindle edition, location 735.
7 Ibid., location 737.
8 http://brightblue.org.uk/immediate-public-expectations-of-and-priorities/
9 Chris Grey, https://chrisgreybrexitblog.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-battle-between-remembering-and.html
10 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-50956221
This book brings together writings on Brexit from three main sources. The main one is my home territory at the Irish Times, where I have enjoyed the unfailing support of Paul O’Neill, John McManus, Conor Goodman and many other great colleagues. It is one of the most civilised newspapers in the world and I never forget my good fortune at having landed there. I am also deeply grateful to Katherine Butler, Jonathan Shainin, Paul Laity and their colleagues at the Guardian and to Robert Yates at the Observer. I am greatly indebted, too, to Jana Prikryl, Matt Seaton and the editors of the New York Review of Books. I am very lucky, too, to have the support, encouragement and sound advice of my editor Neil Belton and all the staff at Head of Zeus and of my agent Natasha Fairweather. The luck of having Clare Connell’s patience and indulgence is the greatest windfall of them all.
For the first time in 100 years, the British head of state is able to pay an official visit to what is now the Irish Republic. Queen Elizabeth is warmly received; protests are minimal. There is, above all, a sense of relief. A very long and often dark story seems to be over. Ireland and Britain are now good neighbours, working closely together on the peace process in Northern Ireland and as fellow members of the European Union. What could possibly go wrong?
There are, presumably, two rules the Queen has absorbed so deeply that they have become instinctive: don’t take risks; don’t stir emotions. She broke both rules in Ireland last week. Most of us had expected a bland occasion whose significance lay simply in the fact that it was happening at all. What we got was both challenging and moving.
The risks the Queen took were not physical. A massive security operation sealed off the events from most of the Irish public. The pathetic nature of the protests, which struggled to gather more than 200 people at a time, made the security seem disproportionate, but it was a necessary evil. And it did allow the Queen to take risks of an entirely different kind.
She stepped repeatedly on to dangerous ground. She laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance that is dedicated to the generations of Irish rebels who took up arms against British domination and paid with their lives. She touched the raw nerve of Bloody Sunday in 1920 when she visited Croke Park. She stirred memories of the futile sacrifice of Irish troops at Gallipoli and the Somme when she went to Dublin’s long-neglected war memorial. In all of this, she was choosing to thread a path through minefields.
To the great surprise of those of us who have little time for monarchy, she walked that line with amazing grace. It is not simply that she didn’t put a foot wrong. It is that every step seemed exactly right, from her calm humility at the Garden of Remembrance to the beautifully crafted speech that began with a few perfectly pronounced words of Gaelic. If this was a performance, it was a magnificent one. But it always seemed like something more than that.
The Queen’s dignified simplicity at the Garden of Remembrance completely transformed the meaning of the visit. Most Irish people had seen it as a test of their own maturity, the ultimate way of discovering whether we could live without Anglophobia. Elizabeth, remarkably, made it something else as well: a test of British maturity.
While all the talk had been about Irish identity, British identity was being challenged too. The familiar question that was posed was whether the Irish have got over their sometimes neurotic love–hate relationship with the Brits. But it was joined by a question that was completely unexpected: have the British got over their post-imperial delusions of grandeur? Or to put it another way, is Britain’s self-image now sufficiently cleansed of the stains of empire that it can treat Ireland as an equal?
It is rather extraordinary that the Queen, of all people, should be the one to deliver such a positive answer to that question. There was no handwringing and none of the apologies that most Irish people would have found embarrassing anyway. But neither was there a single moment of condescension.
This mattered a lot to Irish people, especially at a moment when Irish self-confidence has been shattered by its economic crisis. But it should also matter to the British. The subjugation of Ireland was the crucible in which Britain’s ‘destiny’ of superiority was forged over 500 years ago. The Queen’s visit closed a long chapter in Irish history, but it also signalled the end of that idea of what it means to be British. As Anglo-Irish relations are normalised, Britain, too, becomes a normal country.
|
23 June 2016: |
UK holds referendum on its membership of the EU, with the majority of voters choosing to leave the EU (51.9 per cent of the vote, versus 48.1 per cent voting to remain). |
|
24 June 2016: |
Shortly after the result is announced, Prime Minister David Cameron makes known his intention to resign. |
|
13 July 2016: |
Theresa May becomes the new UK prime minister. |
|
2 October 2016: |
In her party conference speech, Theresa May confirms Article 50 will be triggered before the end of March 2017 |
Six days before the Brexit referendum, it seems that something profound is being created: not a mere exit from the EU but the real possibility of an English state. Yet no one seems to want to talk about it.
It is a question the English used to ask about their subject peoples: are they ready for self-government? But it is now one that has to be asked about the English themselves. It’s not facetious: England seems to be stumbling towards a national independence it has scarcely even discussed, let alone prepared for. It is on the brink of one of history’s strangest nationalist revolutions.
When you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement. If the Leave side wins the referendum, it will almost certainly be without a majority in either Scotland or Northern Ireland and perhaps without winning Wales either. The passion that animates it is English self-assertion. And the inexorable logic of Brexit is the logic of English nationalism: the birth of a new nation state bounded by the Channel and the Tweed.
Over time, the main political entity most likely to emerge from Brexit is not a Britain with its greatness restored or a sweetly reunited kingdom. It is a standalone England. Scotland will have a second referendum on independence, this time with the lure of staying in the European Union. Northern Ireland will be in a horrendous bind, cut off from the rest of the island by a European border and with the UK melting around it. Its future as an unwanted appendage of a shrunken Britain is unsustainable. Wales is more uncertain, but a resurgence of Welsh nationalism after Brexit is entirely possible, especially after a Scottish departure from the UK. After Brexit, an independent England will emerge by default.
And this is, of course, a perfectly legitimate aspiration. Nationalism, whether we like it or not, is almost universal and the English have as much right to it as anyone else. There’s nothing inherently absurd about the notion of England as an independent nation state. It’s just that if you’re going to create a new nation state, you ought to be talking about it, arguing for it, thinking it through. And this isn’t happening. England seems to be muddling its way towards a very peculiar event: accidental independence.
The first thing about the idea of England as a nation state that governs itself and only itself is that it is radically new. The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly ‘standing alone’, as it did against the Spanish Armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early tenth century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016, when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.
Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.
English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) ‘ourselves alone’. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead.
As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: ‘There is no future in England’s dreaming.’
Hardly anyone is even talking about England – all the Brexit arguments are framed in terms of Britain or the UK, as if these historically constructed and contingent entities will simply carry on regardless in the new dispensation. The Brexiteers imagine an earthquake that will, curiously, leave the domestic landscape unaltered. English nationalism is thus a very strange phenomenon – a passion that is driving a nation towards historic change but one that seems unwilling even to speak its own name.
It is hard to think of any parallel for this. Successful national independence movements usually have five things going for them: a deep sense of grievance against the existing order; a reasonably clear (even if invented) idea of a distinctive national identity; a shared (albeit largely imaginary) narrative of the national past; a new elite-in-waiting; and a vision of a future society that will be better because it is self-governing.
The English nationalism that underlies Brexit has, at best, one of these five assets: the sense of grievance is undeniably powerful. It’s also highly ambiguous – it is rooted in the shrinking of British social democracy but the actual outcome of Brexit will be an even closer embrace of unfettered neoliberalism. There is a weird mismatch between the grievance and the solution.
None of the other four factors applies. As a cultural identity, Englishness is wonderfully potent but not distinctive – its very success means that it is global property. From the English language to the Beatles, from Shakespeare to the Premier League, its icons are planetary. The great cultural appeal of nationalism – we need political independence or our unique culture will die – just doesn’t wash. Moreover, this power of English culture derives precisely from its capacity to absorb immigrant energies. From the Smiths to Zadie Smith, from the Brontës to Dizzee Rascal, it is very hard to imagine an ‘English’ culture that is not also Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Irish, Jewish and so on.
Is there a shared narrative of the English past that functions even as a useful collective invention? English nationalism has a hard time integrating the past of John Ball and the Levellers, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine with that of monarchs, generals and imperial power.
As for an elite-in-waiting, the English nationalist movement certainly has one. But the handover of elite power that will accompany this particular national revolution will surely be the most underwhelming in history – from one set of public school and Oxbridge Tories to another. And this elite’s vision of a future society seems to come down to the same lump of money – the (dishonestly) alleged £350 million a week that will be saved by leaving the EU – being spent over and over on everything from the National Health Service to farm subsidies. Plus, of course, fewer immigrants, thereby creating some kind of imaginary Lebensraum. There is no attempt to articulate any set of social principles by which the new England might govern itself.
When it comes down to it, nationalism is about the line between Them and Us. The Brexiteers seem pretty clear about Them – Brussels bureaucrats and immigrants. It’s just the Us bit that they haven’t quite worked out yet. Being ready for self-government demands a much better sense of the self you want to govern.
With two days to go to the vote, it seems clear to me that Leave will win. Which prompts the question: what is the attraction of self-harm?
I hurt myself today / To see if I still feel
TRENT REZNOR, ‘Hurt’.
Why do people cut themselves? Obviously because they are unhappy, frustrated, angry. They feel that no one cares about them, no one listens to them. But it is still hard to understand the attractions of inflicting pain on yourself.
Two things seem to make cutting addictive. One is that it gives the pain you feel a name and a location. You can feel it and see it – it has an immediate focus that is somehow more tolerable than the larger, deeper distress. The other is that it provides the illusion of control. You choose to do it; you are taking an action and producing a result. It is a kind of power, even if the only one you can exercise that power over is yourself, and even if the only thing you can do to yourself is damage.
The thing to remember is that, even though these actions are irrational, the distress is often entirely rational. It may be well founded. Maybe it’s true that nobody cares about you. Maybe your parents are so wrapped up in their own conflicts and obsessions that they don’t really listen to you or pay attention to what’s going on in your life. Maybe you feel powerless because you actually are powerless.
Just look at what’s happening to Greece: the EU is slowly, sadistically and quite deliberately turning one of its own member states into a third-world country. And it is doing this simply to make a point. No serious person now believes that the EU’s Greek policies are working or will work. Greece’s infamous debts were 100 per cent of GDP in 2007. The so-called bailouts have pushed them up to 180 per cent now and a projected 250 per cent by 2060. And all for what? To satisfy some crudely religious notion that sinners must be severely punished if virtue is to flourish.
A polity that inflicts such pointless suffering on some of its most vulnerable citizens is morally askew.
The EU lost its moral compass when the Berlin Wall fell. Before that, it was in a competition against communism. The generations of Western European leaders who had experienced the chaos of the 1930s and 1940s were anxious to prove that a market system could be governed in such a way as to create full employment, fair opportunities and steady progress towards economic equality.
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. It also moved away from evidence-based economics – the German-led austerity drive after 2008 has been impervious to the realities of its own failure.
The social consequences have been shrugged off. Inequality has risen across the continent: the richest seven million people in Europe now have the same amount of wealth as the poorest 662 million people. There are now 123 million people in the EU at risk of poverty. That’s a quarter of the EU population.
This has been allowed to happen because the fear of social and political chaos went out of the system. There is a European technocratic elite 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 those two powerful words: or else. It was an institution that knew that if things are not held together by collective justice, things 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 such as the ill-conceived euro.
But Brexit is still self-harm. For the cynical leaders of the Brexit campaign, the freedom they desire is the freedom to dismantle the environmental, social and labour protections that they call ‘red tape’. They want to sever the last restraints on the very market forces that have caused the pain. They offer a jagged razor of incoherent English nationalism to distressed and excluded communities and say: ‘Go on, cut yourself, it feels good.’
And if Brexit happens it will feel good. It will be exhilarating and empowering. It will make English hearts beat faster and the blood flow more quickly. Until they eventually notice that it’s their own blood that is flowing.
It is early morning and the results are in. Even if you expected Leave to win, it is still hard to absorb what has happened. This is an immediate attempt.
The English always prided themselves on not doing revolutions.
Their last one, in 1688, was, for them, a curiously polite affair: the blood flowed at Aughrim and the Boyne, but not in East Anglia or Bristol.
The self-image of English conservatives is one of slow, careful, moderate change. And now, ironically, the very people who claim to revere this heritage have staged a sudden, reckless, leap-in-the-dark coup. The country that prides itself on sober moderation has made one of the most impulsive moves ever undertaken in a developed democracy. The stiff upper lips have parted and released a wild and inarticulate cry of rage and triumph.
Make no mistake: this is an English nationalist revolution.
At its heart are all of the things the English used to see as the province of other, less rational, nations: identity, difference, the deep passions of belonging and resentment. It did not, in the end, matter that no one on the Brexit side could articulate a coherent economic case for leaving the EU. It did not even matter that those who will take over from David Cameron will be right-wing market fundamentalists whose policies will deepen the very inequalities and alienation that have driven working-class voters towards Leave. It did not even matter that the very entity in whose name independence is being claimed – the United Kingdom – is surely doomed by Brexit.
What mattered was what always matters in nationalist revolutions: the appeal of Us against Them.
It helped the Leave campaign enormously that Them is both tangible and abstract, both very near and quite far away.
It is, on the one hand, the visible faces of large numbers of immigrants and, on the other, the faceless bureaucracy in Brussels. These were perfect targets for resentment, not least because they can’t answer back. Immigrants and bureaucrats were not on anybody’s campaigning platform. It was easy to turn them into sinister forces bent on crowding the English out of their own homeland and binding them in chains of red tape.
And it helped, too, that the European Union really is in a terrible state, that the passing of the generation of European leaders who experienced the Second World War has left a vacuum where visionary leadership ought to be. Painting the EU as a failed project is grossly simplistic, but there is enough truth in this crude portrait for people to recognise the likeness.
It helped, finally and most ironically of all, that the same Conservative Party whose internal disputes created this historic moment, is governing with the very limited legitimacy that 35 per cent of the vote confers. Britain’s unreformed first-past-the-post electoral system has left huge parts of the population feeling democratically irrelevant and unrepresented. However much one might be repelled by UKIP, it is obvious that when four million people vote for a party and it gets just a single MP, Westminster itself becomes Them for many voters.
But if the Them side of the nationalist equation is strong, the Us side is dangerously weak.
This is a revolution that has scarcely spoken its own name. The English nationalism that fuelled it was not explicitly on the table – it was cloaked in talk of Britain and the UK, as if those historically constructed entities would be unshaken by the earthquake of Brexit. The English have no modern experience of national independence and the referendum campaign articulated no vision of what an independent England will actually look like.
The key word in the pro-Brexit rhetoric was ‘back’ – take back control; take back our country. Insofar as there is any vision behind the revolution, it is nostalgic. There is the illusion that England will now go back to the way it used to be – a vigorous world power with a secure sense of its own identity that stands defiantly alone. It’s a used-to-be that arguably never was and that certainly is not going to be restored. In looking for security and stability, the English have launched themselves into one of the most unstable and uncertain periods in their modern history.
As the morning wears on, an image floats up into bleary consciousness.
Did you ever see a slightly drunk man trying that trick with the tablecloth? He thinks he can whip the cloth off the table with a fast, clean snap, but leave all the crockery perfectly intact. He gives a sharp tug and stands back with a triumphant flourish as the plates and glasses come flying to the ground and shatter all around him.
That’s what Brexit is like. Those who have driven it have successfully pulled the cloth off the table – the underlying fabric of modern Britain has been whipped away with a shocking suddenness.
They stand in triumph, sure that they have pulled off the trick of removing a whole layer of political reality without disturbing all the family tableware. They have yet to notice that so much that was on the table is now at their feet, broken, perhaps irreparably.
Brexit has achieved the breathtaking feat of causing deep cracks in four different polities at a single stroke.
One of them, most obviously, is the European Union. For the first time in its history, the EU’s engine has gone decisively into reverse. At the simplest level, it has been a process of relentless expansion – no large entity in modern history has grown so rapidly since the United States in the nineteenth century.
And now the steady advance has become a full-blown retreat. The whole psychology of the European project has been turned on its head – instead of ever-widening frontiers, the EU now has to think about how to prevent a retreat from becoming a rout.
The rout that must be feared is a disorderly overthrow of liberal European values. When Nigel Farage speaks, as he did in his moment of triumph early today, of victory for ‘the real people, the decent people’, the undertone is that nearly half of the UK’s voters are neither real nor decent.
England has not had the time, nor made the effort, to develop an inclusive, civic, progressive nationalism. It is left with a nationalism that is scarcely articulated in positive terms at all and that thus plugs into the darker energies of resentment and xenophobia.
But this is not just an English disease. Brexit is a huge boost to the European far right. The EU already has two member states – Poland and Hungary – that have moved towards authoritarian nationalism and away from liberal democracy. The success of the English nationalist revolution (and that is what Brexit is) will further energise those forces throughout the union.
This will please some of the Brexiteers, of course – at least until the more moderate of them realise that they are, after all, Europeans and that the fate of Europe is their fate, too. But they surely cannot be so complacent about the other three polities they have managed to crack.
One of them is the UK. A second Scottish independence referendum is inevitable – and this time the pro-independence side will have the enormous advantage of putting forward a conservative proposition that has overwhelming popular support: keep Scotland in the EU.
The utter refusal of the pro-Brexit campaigners, almost of all of whom would claim to venerate the union, to take the breakup of the UK seriously suggests that, deep down, they really don’t care that much about it. English self-assertion has trumped UK preservation. The consequences will play out over the next decade: the chances are that by the tenth anniversary of what the victors are hailing as Independence Day, it will be English independence that is explicitly celebrated.
And this has deeply unsettling implications for the third cracked polity, Northern Ireland. A few pro-Remain voices, such as Trades Union Congress general secretary Frances O’Grady, tried in the referendum debates to make a gentle plea to voters to think about Ireland and the Belfast Agreement. They went unheard.
English nationalists, it turns out, wouldn’t give the froth off a pint of real ale for the Irish peace process. They have recklessly imposed an EU land border between Newry and Dundalk, between Letterkenny and Derry. What grounds are there to believe that when they come to power in their own little England, they will care about (or pay for) a province they clearly regard as a closer, wetter Gibraltar, an irrelevant appendage of the motherland? It beggars belief that the Democratic Unionist Party made common cause with a movement whose logical outcome is the end of the union.
The last piece of the tableware that must now be badly fissured is the least expected: England itself. The English seem to have been utterly unprepared for how deeply divided they are, how bitter and angry the Brexit debate would be, how political assassination would return to the streets of England.