No. 28 - The Causes of Brexit - A View from the Outside

Dear James, 

 In this brief lull before Brexit erupts again in parliament this week, I thought I should recommend to you a new book which attempts to explain how this wonderful country of ours has descended into its current cycle of self inflicted pain and harm. If politicians need a deeper perspective, then this book provides it. 

 It is called ‘Heroic Failure’ and is by Fintan O’Toole, an Irish commentator who writes for the Irish Times. It is a quasi-psychoanalytical analysis of the English ‘political mind’. In other words it attempts to explain the psychodrama being played out in our parliament and homes at this extraordinary moment in our history.

In July 2018 Anna Soubry’s stated in the Commons that, ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted to leave on the basis that somebody with a gold plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them’. In other words why would a nation want to inflict so much self-harm on itself behind the banners of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson and their patrician life styles? 

O’Toole goes back through the history of our nation and points to the very British  idea of heroic failure as something to be lauded. He cites, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, ‘Dunkirk’, ‘Islandwana’ and several, other instances whereby the British upper classes have converted failure into a psycho-triumph and whereby weakness and decline became success and glory. He suggests that our current travails are a modern version of this phenomenon, with heroic failure being converted into national ‘self-pity’. Essentially, our loss of empire without the loss of a sense of imperial power that accompanied it has left the Tory party with a set of attitudes and behaviours but with nowhere to exercise them. Self pity gives us the comfort of a grievance coupled with a sense of superiority unrecognized. To support this the Brexiteers have managed to turn the colonizer into the colonized with its fantasy that we have been subsumed by this monolith called the EU. In other words the Brexiteers have converted their followers into victims. He shows how this reconstruction of the EU as oppressor has been carried out by the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage on the basis of the inflation of trivia into the big issues of the Leave campaign. Johnson’s selecting the trope of prawn cocktail flavoured crisps being banned by the EU was a case in point. There was never any such decision by Europe but Johnson expanded his lie and many others into the sense of ‘self-pity’ that is at the centre of Brexiteer mythology. As far as the less well off Brits are concerned O’Toole focuses on the Punk phenomenon of the 1980s. This popularized sadomasochism, the infliction of pain upon the self as a precursor to inflicting pain on the enemy. It was these two phenomena, working class punk and upper class self-pity that bonded these two unlikely extremes together in a single movement. Johnson thrilled in his ability to send rocks over the garden wall and hearing the crash of glass from the greenhouse next door while Johnny Rotten gloried in walking up and down King’s Road spitting at people ‘because they were stupid’.  This is the centre of the Faustian Pact between Jacob Rees Mogg and his patrician friends and the people of Sunderland. The movement yearns for ‘a restoration of Britain as a great power, England as it used to be. But neither of these things is possible’. 

With the referendum, the Brexit movement suddenly found itself faced with the conundrum of having to destroy the enemy concocted by their feverish imaginations even though that enemy was a fantasy. You cannot destroy what does not exist and hence the inability for Messrs Davis, Johnson, Fox and Gove to come up with any kind of plan.  And this surely is the conundrum facing us all now. Mrs May is trying to reconcile the unachievable demands of the Brexiteers with the plea for common sense from a majority of the people; those who know that we must become a modern nation, freed from this self-defeating concept of glory embedded in self pity.  

Every country needs its national story. At the moment ours is at crossroads between the old and the new. It takes a good friend and neighbour to help us to see the truth. Mr O’Toole has done it. If you do have time to read the book, it is published by Head Zeus with the ISBN number 9781789540986. 

I commend it for your consideration.

Kind regards, 

BH - Your Concerned Constituent