This weekend I have been reading Fintan O'Toole's book, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the politics of pain (Head of Zeus £11.99). It's a look at Brexit and where it came from through the eyes of an Irish historian and writer. O'Toole has a column in the Irish Times and is required reading for remainers. He puts Brexit down largely to self pity, a sort of national feeling of victimhood as if we are being denied what it is we are properly and rightfully entitled to with the EU cast as denier and oppressor.
I am afraid there is a lot of truth in the book.
In an argument he has made before, he says all the talk of Britain as an EU member having to follow regulations it didn't vote for like a virtual vassal, is going to be followed by actual vassalage after we leave, when we will forced to follow regulations we are not even allowed to vote for. All brought about by the Brexiteers themselves.
He quotes the words of Russel Bretherton, a minor official from the Board of Trade, who was an observer at the original talks to form the EEC in 1955, a time when Britain still had a navy and bases across the world and could convince itself it still had a global role. Bretherton told the assembled negotiators:
"The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed, if it was agreed it has no chance of being ratified ; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture which we don't like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonchance".
He could not have been more wrong.
Another theme in the book is the tilting at windmills which passes for political debate about the EU where trivial and insignificant grievances are inflated out of all proportion to matters of existential national importance. Johnson being the instigator in chief.
The contradictory chasms between Brexiteers is on display when he talks of BoJo's battle against non-existent EU regulations supposedly banning prawn cocktail crisps - he wants everybody to be able to eat whatever they like. Meanwhile, Julia Hartley-Brewer, an extreme Brexiteer if ever there was one, says parents of fat kids are 'child abusers' and should be reported to the police. See the problem?
With overt racism being all but stamped out by law in this country and being forced underground, O'Toole thinks there was a need to transfer the blame for all our difficulties away the black and Asian communities. As we were casting about for something or someone else, the EU hove into sight and became a convenient whipping boy, a lightning rod for every ill.
There is the national cognitive dissonance, at least on the part of the Brexiteers, of believing at one and the same time that we are constantly being out manoeuvred, out traded and oppressed in the EU, but after Brexit we will magically be transformed into a global leader in free trade something we have notably failed to do in the past seventy years in and out of Europe.
And for many older people, O'Toole thinks there is the bizarre notion that we are somehow being subjugated by the Germans after Britain won the war. Nicholas Ridley, a minister in the Thatcher government was forced to resign in 1990 after he called the EU a ''German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe". In O'Toole's words it is the victor thinking like the vanquished.
He raises the casual use of wartime analogies used before and after the referendum campaign by leavers. Daniel Hannan is quoted talking about the EU 'dictating terms as if to a defeated enemy' and Brussels talking to us as if we're a 'hostile power'.
BoJo has talked about punishment beatings and even Hunt has talked about the EU as a Soviet prison. Rees-Mogg uses the French and compares Brexit with Waterloo, Crecy and Agincourt, saying, "We win all these things". O'Toole questions who the "we" is since during the hundred years war it was the innocent civilians who paid the price in suffering, horror and misery. So it will be with Brexit. Rees-Mogg and his like won't suffer at all. Isn't it amazing how a few million can insulate you from almost anything.
These constant war time analogies came to mind when I picked up The Telegraph on Saturday morning and read Charles Moore's column (HERE) which I usually do to keep my blood pressure up. Moore says:
"Mr Enders [outgoing boss of Airbus] is one of the leading Germans who last week signed a letter to The Times saying how much they loved this country and would “miss” it post-Brexit. This week, though, he turned nasty. In a company video, he starts shouting at the British people about the Brexit “precipice”. He accuses Brexit of “threatening to destroy” a century of his company’s expertise. “Please don’t listen” to Brexiteers, he tells us, forgetting that he is referring to 17.4 million voters. Britain “no longer has the capability to go it alone”, so we must surrender. I recommend watching the film: Mr Enders’s tone is disturbingly arrogant, like that of an interrogator in a war film".
There it is again, the old wartime references, eh? The MP and lunatic Mark Francois, also on the topic of the Airbus CEO, talks about his father (HERE), who was apparently a D-Day veteran never being bullied by the Germans, before theatrically tearing up Mr Enders' letter on camera. Airbus employ directly and indirectly 110,000 people in this country. Francois is a Conservative MP, the party of business although you wouldn't know it.
Finally, Mr O'Toole addresses what is perhaps the greatest hidden driver of Brexit, English nationalism, but it's such a big topic I want to give it some thought before commenting on it, because I think it holds the key to our entire understanding of Brexit.
What strange times we live in. And hats off to Fintan O'Toole for showing us to ourselves.
What strange times we live in. And hats off to Fintan O'Toole for showing us to ourselves.
