Uncle Bob's Brexit Blues

June 7, 2019

THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE

AN acquaintance of ours, a family member, let’s call him Uncle Bob, has always been a bit right-wing, a bit racist, a bit Thatcherite. He was always a bit “send ‘em back we’ve no room”, a bit “I’m all right, Jack and sod everyone else,” a bit “if I had to work then why shouldn’t everyone else?” Despite his mostly impeccable working class credentials, he was always, “Enoch was right” and “things were better under Maggie”. 

But two years or so of Brexit bollocks have allowed him to really fulfil his potential. Always amiable, he now gives way to a specific brand of rage that brooks no humour and tolerates no argument, that allows no logic to intervene, that believes what happened in June 2016 was a long-postponed insurrection against the forces of limp-wristed liberalism, that thinks there are traitors in our midst trying to sell our birthright to layabouts, queers, Pakis and perverts. 

Unable to accept the complexities of pulling out of an all-embracing international treaty that has insinuated itself into our domestic laws and institutions for more than four decades, he resorts to incantations (“WTO rules!”) and conspiracy theories (the politicians are “traitors” who are deliberately defying “The Will of the People”). 

At the heart of this volcanic anger is an unanswered question: what actually is The Will of the People? In local elections held throughout England in early May during my visit home, the voters who bothered to cast their ballots chose to “punish” the two main parties, though it was clearly for a variety of reasons. The main beneficiaries were the Lib Dems, the Greens and a ragbag of “independents”, but there are images online of a defaced ballot paper in which the mainstream candidates are labelled “traitors” and the name of Nigel Farage is scrawled in as an alternative.

The European elections, won by Nigel Farage’s new Brexit Party, also did nothing to suggest any sort of public consensus, just an unshakeable and acrimonious divide.  One thinks of the famous Yeats line: “The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”  

Shortly after the local election vote, in one of the few surviving pubs in a small post-industrial town buried in the outer folds of the Pennines, Uncle Bob was easy to provoke and hard to pacify. I hate it, he roared, railing against the traitors in parliament who weren’t even trying to do what “the people” wanted them to do, largely because they wanted to remain on the EU “gravy train” for the remainder of their wretched lives.

The people who agreed with Uncle Bob on Brexit were, it seems, motivated by principle, even those who owned hedge funds that would profit massively from a “no deal”. By contrast, the people who disagreed with him were all driven by corrupt self-interest, because as far as he was concerned, they couldn’t possibly think that European integration was a good in itself and therefore had to be benefiting from it financially. 

Right-wing working class anti-EU opinion seems to coagulate around the idea of people  - liberals, bureaucrats, socialists, immigrants, drug addicts, welfare scroungers - getting something for nothing. Baby-boomer Bob is jealously protective of his own particular entitlements, but instead of appreciating his good fortune, he lives in horror at the idea that the system will eventually come tumbling down, pulled apart at the seams by millions of feckless deviants.

Uncle Bob also represents a resentment against the cosmopolitan, the educated, the talented, the morally superior that reminds me of what Sartre said all those years ago in Antisemite and Jew. 

We must remember that a man is not necessarily humble or even modest because he has consented to mediocrity. On the contrary, there is a passionate pride among the mediocre, and anti-Semitism is an attempt to give value to mediocrity as such, to create an elite of the ordinary.   

There has always been a certain climate of opinion in England that says that anyone vaguely left-wing or liberal and actually achieves anything is automatically subject to scrutiny and criticism. Anyone vaguely left-wing or liberal who does anything remotely heroic or even merely decent is constantly probed for the possibility of corruption or hypocrisy. This is the Daily Mail mindset - raging against environmentalists, animal rights activists and other assorted “do-gooders”. Anyone whose virtue puts Uncle Bob and his ilk to shame must be tarred and tainted and brought down a peg or two, with immediate effect.

Sartre also wrote about certain types of provincial racists that “delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.” 

Uncle Bob did not fall silent. He simply seethed. “You lot,” he kept saying, as if we were all part of the same problem: do-gooders handing over the nation to Islamic fundamentalists.

In his rage, poor Uncle Bob hasn’t yet been able to acknowledge that the democratic forces that gathered behind Brexit made it close to impossible to achieve. Primarily, it was built on promises that were irreconcileable and self-contradictory. End free movement while retaining the benefits of EU membership? Withdraw from the customs union while avoiding a hard Irish border? Scrap all your trade rules and relationships and expect to be more prosperous, rather than less?  For the committed Brexiteers, this is mere detail, and mentioning them is nothing more than a failure of nerve, or worse, a conspiracy against the people. MPs have allowed themselves to be held to ransom by the Irish and shafted by duplicitous Europeans, and we should leave, immediately, and turn to “WTO rules”. Whatever the consequences, proud Albion should still stand up against the devious Continentals.

EU CONTRAIRE 

THERE’S also a spirit of devilish contrarianism that underlies many of England's political gestures. This is the spirit that Orwell talked about: a desire to pull someone’s pants down just for the sheer hell of it, “the voice of the belly protesting against the soul”. It is not entirely English: it is also the spirit behind the Scottish comedian Jerry Sadowitz, who unsurprisingly came out as an angry, raging ultra-Brexiteer and Trump supporter confounding all notions of cooperation and internationalism during a set he performed in Leamington Spa in May. 

It is the spirit, a very British spirit, that likes to lash out against liberal do-gooders of all stripes, that relishes in calling Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" and General Pinochet a bulwark against Bolshevism. It is the spirit of Kingsley Amis and his "fascist lunches", where unacceptable opinions are put forward, with a layer of irony and usually under the cover of humour, with the ultimate justification that they puncture the sanctimonious and bring the likes of Polly Toynbee down a peg or two. Toynbee herself wrote about it years ago in her coruscating obituary of Auberon Waugh, whom she called a “ghastly man” in a “coterie of reactionary fogeys” who “spit poison at anyone vulgar enough to want to improve anything at all.”  

As the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole pointed out in Heroic Failure, yet another account of Brexit, the hostility to the EU was always intertwined somehow with the battle against “political correctness” and "health and safety” and all those effete and unpatriotic obsessions with removing toxins from food and banning asbestos. It is the spirit of "in my day we didn't have any of this namby-pamby mollycoddling of criminals and perverts".  

It  also explains that curious hostility to the welfare state that sometimes develops in the minds of the people - like Uncle Bob - who were supposed to be its major beneficiaries. The welfare state, explains O’Toole, is transmogrified into the nanny state through artful propaganda about the (fictional) threats to our prawn cocktail crisps and Pot Noodles.  

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.

WHY OH WHY?

BUT in The Lure of Greatness, one of the most captivating (and strangely uplifting) explanations of Brexit, Anthony Barnett raises the possibility that the referendum result was a consequence of England’s imprisonment in ancient notions of the British Empire and Monarchy, and its long failure to win any sort of modern constitutional settlement for itself. 

Barnett’s theory goes like this: England’s spatchcocked political system had left a sufficient number of voters so tired of the status quo, and with so little stake in the long neo-liberal consensus administered by parties from both the Left and the Right, that they voted to do something about it the first chance they had. Brexit, essentially, was a cry for help.

Brexit was a consequence of our moth-eaten, patchwork constitution and the inability of our institutions to build consent and ensure as many voices as possible are fed into the country’s decision-making processes. 

Britain’s (or England’s) failure to achieve any sort of constitutional coherence has created gaps in consent and eroded any notion of democratic oversight, Barnett argues. A new settlement is overdue, but the masses chose instead to blame the EU for their woes and frustrations. Explicitly, Barnett calls Brexit “an understandable expression of extreme exasperation at the disappointment of botched renewal and a willingness to bet on a different form of change.” He blames Tony Blair in particular for his own “disastrous course of incoherent reform” that devolved power to Scottish and Welsh parliaments but gave England nothing and destroyed the traditions that underpinned collective cabinet government.  

Some have even suggested Britain and Europe are fundamentally, culturally, historically, psychologically and philosophically incompatible. The EU has been imposing "Napoleonic" laws on England, undermining its ancient traditions of.. well, what exactly? It is the old Norman yoke theory again, with these Continentals smashing our Witans, subjugating our Ealdormen, and running roughshod over our Anglo-Saxon heritage - our history of consultation and compromise - and denting the arc of our history that has bent gloriously towards justice for millennia. 

All this is very interesting, but what does it mean to Uncle Bob and his ilk?  There are a multitude of Brexits and a multitude of motivations for choosing it. I don’t think Uncle Bob ever gave a damn about quantitative easing or the widening gap between rich and poor.  In fact, he would probably have voted “leave” at any point in the past thirty or forty years, thinking it would somehow lock in his own gains as he moved up the socioeconomic ladder. 

The late great Jeremy Hardy once said that it wasn’t the poor that voted BNP, but the lower middle-class, what he called the “patio Falangists”. Uncle Bob became a classic patio Faragist, one of thousands living in the relatively prosperous parts of northern towns like Burnley or Blackburn or Bradford, living in terror in the face of The Other.

And thus, was Brexit always a manifestation of mere racism, and the fear that England’s spaces are about to be swamped by transsexual Polish ISIS vegetarian gypsy freeloaders stinking of garlic and speaking Foreign in public spaces? 

A few months ago, Tim Adams in The Observer wrote that “one of the simplest distinctions [dividing the Leave and Remain tribes].... has always seemed to come down to that division between those who relish the idea of being cheek-by-jowl with people unlike themselves, and those who feel threatened by that idea.” Uncle Bob’s town is certainly cheek-by-jowl: a tiny post-industrial wasteland of around 30,000 people in which the traditional instruments of social cohesion - the factories and unions, the pubs and working men’s clubs, even the old churches - have all been shut down and replaced by mosques, Islamic schools and community centres, and halal butchers and grocers. It is a town in which the majority white community has been so evidently defeated and forced out of its public spaces, while the minority Pakistani culture grows and thrives.

David Goodhart famously made a distinction between “citizens of somewhere” and “citizens of anywhere”, with the latter rebranded and denounced by Theresa May as “citizens of nowhere”. And one can understand and sympathise with the Somewheres, and sometimes share their instincts. 

Terrified by my evanescence, I myself am becoming increasingly preoccupied with the notion of roots - laying them, protecting them, ensuring they last. I don’t want the entire world to be the blur of a crowd on a city thoroughfare. I want space, peace, somewhere tranquil I can call my own. I am for the time being stuck in Shanghai, which is never allowed to stay still, but like a cranky old timer living in the crags of the Pennines, I don’t want change. I am tired of change. Change, at my age, can only make things worse. I prefer to sit down and reflect on how I got here, rather than plot a course for somewhere else. If it is so desperate to leave me behind, then the future can take a running jump as far as I’m concerned. 

As the late great Australian poet Les Murray once put it:  

Though I myself run to the cities, I will forever
be coming back here to walk, knee-deep in ferns, 
up and away from this metropolitan century,
to remember my ancestors. 

We all need to understand that some people don’t actually want and didn’t ever vote for transformation or difference or diversity. It’s all very well accusing old northern towns of intolerance or white supremacy or whatever, but something’s got to rankle somewhere - someone’s going to feel displaced - when a 200-year old church is closed down and replaced by the green dome of a mosque. Brexit was the one opportunity the voters got to try to take revenge over the liberal elites and their assumptions that the lumpenproletariat must accept whatever changes you foist upon them for their own bloody good.

“Globalisation” often serves not merely as shorthand for the sort of rapid flows of capital that enable outsourcing and encourage governments to engage in competitive cost-cutting in order to attract giant transnational corporations, but also as a sort of euphemism for open borders and the “floods” of foreigners that have descended on traditional working class communities, most recently as a result of the Single Market. 

But more fundamentally, what happens if Brexit and Trump - generators of so much hot air about petty-minded provincial backlashes against “globalism”, about the yearnings in Britain for empire, or about the underlying constitutional flaws in both the United Kingdom and the United States - are little more than passing symptoms of a broader structural economic transition driven by exponential technological advances and characterised by a rapid decline in the number of jobs and an inevitable surge in unemployment?  

O’Toole put it like this. 

For most of those who voted for it, Brexit means a 'return to the nation state'. But for many of those behind it, there is a very different ideal. They use this language because it is the only one that is politically viable. But for them the exit from the EU is really a prelude to the exit from the nation state into a world where the rich are truly free because they are truly stateless. 

That's to say, they are Ayn-Randian in their glorification of the individual. It is a vision of a world run by and on behalf of Bond supervillains in their gilded volcanoes. 

On that vituperative evening in May, Uncle Bob was particularly annoyed by any attempts to impugn that preening ninny Jacob Rees-Mogg. But Rees-Mogg is transparently a part of this alternative Bond Villain Brexit, and forms part of a global cabal that includes not only Trump but also Putin, the Koch brothers, Paypal's Peter Thiel and various other youthful dotcom billionaires unconvinced of the requirement to pay taxes or show any sort of social responsibility at all. You might say Uncle Bob has been had. But he would never admit it.  

WHY ARE WE ALL SO ANGRY ALL THE TIME? 

ALL this raises an important question: was all this anger always there - inchoate, waiting for the opportunity to express itself - or did Brexit create it? Without the 2016 referendum, could this surplus of toxic testosterone even have been capable of flooding social media, souring all public discourse, dividing familes and drowning all those old-fashioned notions of civility and politesse, of which we all used to be so proud? 

Would Uncle Bob have been less angry with Brussels if the role of local government was strengthened, or if the rights of parliament to scrutinise legislation were enshrined in a new constitution, or if England had its own legislature to match those in Scotland and Wales? I don’t know. I can’t quite figure out all the intangible ways government and its traditions shape the thought processes of a 71-year old retired ex-cotton mill worker in an economically depressed town in east Lancashire.

It is impossible to delineate precisely how much Britain’s doddery, threadbare constitutional arrangements have contributed to a reactionary culture dominated by fear, loathing and resentment, even among the relatively well off. The proximate causes of my uncle’s political beliefs appear to be immigration and welfare dependency. Are either of those caused by constitutional failures? If my uncle thought he had a proper stake in society, would he be quite so angry about it all? Is this, ultimately, not about Brexit at all but about a citizenship that thinks it has effectively been stripped of all power and sees the current challenges of extracting the UK from the EU as yet another sign of an elitist establishment refusing to listen to the public and stitching things up to serve their own interests?     

Some like to argue that we were always going to have some sort of reckoning after the appalling fixes that followed the so-called Global Financial Crisis, in which the crippling folies de grandeur of a reckless global banking clique were somehow blamed on village libraries, post offices and bus routes. As the playwright David Hare wrote recently in The New Statesman: 

When the Notting Hill wing of the Tory party, led by David Cameron and George Osborne, exploited a financial meltdown (which was the fault of the banks and the banks alone) in order to pursue a long-planned reallocation of wealth from the public to the private sector, they aimed stomach punches at anyone who believed that the task of politics was to define and serve the common good.

And so, what we saw over the last decade was a flagrant redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich that went by the name of “austerity” and in Britain came under David Cameron’s transparently hypocritical banner, “We’re in this together.” Brexit solved nothing and will probably prove to be counterproductive, but it could be explained as a lashing out, a rupture, a volcano of cathartic violence by the “left behinds”. 

As part of my ridiculous yearning for significance, I once tried to link my father’s demise to the death of old England, to the England I abandoned nearly twenty years ago and can never now get back. As Brexit kicks in and the plutocracy tries to use it as an excuse to wipe out the welfare state, turning the United Kingdom into some parasitical tax haven encrusting itself on the arse of the European Union, I am worried about what my country will now become.

My father was as lumpenproletarian as they come, and had his lingering old-fashioned prejudices, but he was always yearning for something more, something bigger.  He had no sympathy for the intolerant, the soil-bound, the xenophobic. With his background and upbringing, he might have been expected to rage against the immigrants supposedly overwhelming Britain’s beleaguered National Health Service. But he voted Remain. If he could have been there when Uncle Bob was fulminating against “the likes of you” - against hippies and welfare scroungers, against the “Asians” and Poles and Lithuanians and gypsies and criminals, against that Evil Cohort of Unwashed Remoaners betraying the will of England’s silent majority, I like to think my father would have simply told him to shut the fuck up.     

On Question Time the other week, someone in the audience asks why everyone is so bloody angry all the time. Because, says another audience member, politicians aren’t listening. And that, I suppose, is the crux of all this. I remember incidents of rage in my own past and they almost always involve not being recognised, not being respected, not being listened to. I recall a surly airport staff member turning her back on me and refusing even to acknowledge my grievances after we were abandoned without explanation in a sweltering bus on the runway for half an hour.  Courtesy abates rage. Simply being acknowledged reduces rage. That, I suppose, is why Brexit was never really about economics. It wasn’t about the cuts to the country’s gross domestic product as a result of increased tariffs on British cars. It was the rage against a system that doesn’t listen.