Britain is a country under self-inflicted stress, gripped by fear of the unknown. Remainers and Leavers—two tribes that have taken on the mythic stature of Roundheads and Cavaliers in a second civil war—are clinging together like drowning swimmers, each side convinced that the other is provoking an epochal disaster, neither side understanding why the other won’t submit to its version of reason and allow itself to be guided back to the surface. As the deadline approaches and the clock runs down toward the “No Deal” outcome that was supposed to be unthinkable, the divided nation faces what is, by any standards, a major political crisis. However, as British people like to remind one another, we are supposedly at our best in a crisis. [...]
The battle over Europe has been fought not over the technicalities of the “Irish backstop” (maintaining the open border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland), NHS funding, or traffic flow through Dover, let alone harmonized airline regulations or the trading benefits of a Canada-plus model (along the lines of the one Canada signed with the EU in 2016, following seven years of negotiation), but through Spitfires, Cornish pasties, singing “Jerusalem” on the last night of the Proms, and what the Irish historian and journalist Fintan O’Toole calls “the strange sense of imaginary oppression that underlies Brexit.” O’Toole’s Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain is an acid and entertaining examination of what he calls, after the scholar Raymond Williams, the “structure of feeling” that has made the project of leaving the European Union politically possible. [...]
Crucially, the equation of a “European superstate” with a project of German domination is part of what O’Toole calls the “mental cartography” of English conservatism. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher showed François Mitterand a map (taken out of her famous handbag) outlining German expansion under the Nazis, in order to demonstrate her misgivings about German reunification. On January 7 of this year, the pro-Remain Conservative MP Anna Soubry was forced to pause a live TV interview outside Parliament as protesters sang, “Soubry is a Nazi, Soubry is a Nazi la-la-la-la.” The European Union is, to these people, just a stealthy way for the Germans to complete Hitler’s unfinished business.[...]
Though widely derided, this opinion is, in certain circles, something of a commonplace. In his yearning for a cleansing fire to burn away the disloyal and revive a lost organic community, Middleton displays a disturbing protofascist mindset. The idea that the suffering of No Deal Brexit would be fairly shared is, of course, transparently absurd. A primary driver of Brexit, both among ordinary voters and among the political and business elite, is the desire to circumvent “regulation” in the form of European legislation on workers’ rights and safety, and to prevent appeals to the European Court of Human Rights. Brexit would cement the changes that took place after the 2008 crash, which was the pretext for a reduction of the social safety net under the guise of so-called austerity. The aim is to remake Britain as a “buccaneering” (for which read “predatory”) low-tax, high-risk place, a sort of reset to the pre-1945 world, before the inauguration of the welfare state and postwar social democracy. Nothing about the political complexion of its proponents suggests an ambition to build community of any kind.
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