Britain: The End of a Fantasy
Fintan O’Toole
To understand the sensational outcome of the British
election, one must ask a basic question. What happens when phony populism
collides with the real thing?
Last year’s triumph for Brexit has often been paired with
the rise of Donald Trump as evidence of a populist surge. But most of those
joining in with the ecstasies of English nationalist self-assertion were
imposters. Brexit is an elite project dressed up in rough attire. When its
Oxbridge-educated champions coined the appealing slogan “Take back control,”
they cleverly neglected to add that they really meant control by and for the
elite. The problem is that, as the elections showed, too many voters thought
the control should belong to themselves.
Theresa May is a classic phony Brexiter. She didn’t support
it in last year’s referendum and there is no reason to think that, in private,
she has ever changed her mind. But she saw that the path to power led toward
the cliff edge, from which Britain will take its leap into an unknown future
entirely outside the European Union. Her strategy was one of appeasement—of the
nationalist zealots in her own party, of the voters who had backed the hard-right
UK Independence Party (UKIP), and of the hysterically jingoistic Tory press,
especially The Daily Mail.
The actual result of the referendum last year was narrow and
ambiguous. Fifty-two percent of voters backed Brexit but we know that many of
them did so because they were reassured by Boris Johnson’s promise that, when
it came to Europe, Britain could “have its cake and eat it.” It could both
leave the EU and continue to enjoy all the benefits of membership. Britons
could still trade freely with the EU and would be free to live, work, and study
in any EU country just as before. This is, of course, a childish fantasy, and
it is unlikely that Johnson himself really believed a word of it. It was just
part of the game, a smart line that might win a debate at the Oxford
Union.
But what do you do when your crowd-pleasing applause lines
have to become public policy? The twenty-seven remaining member states of the
EU have to try to extract a rational outcome from an essentially irrational
process. They have to ask the simple question: What do you Brits actually want?
And the answer is that the Brits want what they can’t possibly have. They want
everything to change and everything to go as before. They want an end to
immigration—except for all the immigrants they need to run their economy and
health service. They want it to be 1900, when Britain was a superpower and
didn’t have to make messy compromises with foreigners.
To take power, May had to pretend that she, too, dreams
these impossible dreams. And that led her to embrace a phony populism in which
the narrow and ambiguous majority who voted for Brexit under false pretences
are be reimagined as “the people.”
This is not conservatism—it is pure Rousseau. The popular
will had been established on that sacred referendum day. And it must not be
defied or questioned. Hence, Theresa May’s allies in The Daily Mail using the
language of the French revolutionary terror, characterizing recalcitrant judges
and parliamentarians as “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs.”
This is why May called an election. Her decision to do
so—when she had a working majority in parliament—has been seen by some as pure
vanity. But it was the inevitable result of the volkish rhetoric she had
adopted. A working majority was not enough—the unified people must have a
unified parliament and a single, uncontested leader: one people, one
parliament, one Queen Theresa to stand on the cliffs of Dover and shake her
spear of sovereignty at the damn continentals.
And the funny thing is that this seemed possible. As
recently as late April, with the Labour Party in disarray and its leftist
leader Jeremy Corbyn deemed unelectable, the polls were putting the Tories
twenty points ahead and telling May that her coronation was inevitable. All she
had to do was repeat the words “strong and stable” over and over and Labour
would be crushed forever. The opposition would be reduced to a token smattering
of old socialist cranks and self-evidently traitorous Scots. Britain would
become in effect a one-party Tory state. An overawed Europe would bow before
this display of British staunchness and concede a Brexit deal in which supplies
of cake would be infinitely renewed.
There were three problems. Firstly, May demanded her
enormous majority so that she could ride out into the Brexit battle without
having to worry about mutterings in the ranks behind her. But she has no clue
what the battle is supposed to be for. Because May doesn’t actually believe in
Brexit, she’s improvising a way forward very roughly sketched out by other
people. She’s a terrible actor mouthing a script in which there is no plot and
no credible ending that is not an anti-climax. Brexit is a back-of-the-envelope
proposition. Strip away the post-imperial make-believe and the Little England
nostalgia, and there’s almost nothing there, no clear sense of how a middling
European country with little native industry can hope to thrive by cutting
itself off from its biggest trading partner and most important political
alliance.
May demanded a mandate to negotiate—but negotiate what
exactly? She literally could not say. All she could articulate were two
slogans: “Brexit means Brexit” and “No deal is better than a bad deal.” The
first collapses ideology into tautology. The second is a patent absurdity: with
“no deal” there is no trade, the planes won’t fly and all the supply chains
snap. To win an election, you need a convincing narrative but May herself
doesn’t know what the Brexit story is.
Secondly, if you’re going to try the uno duce, una voce
trick, you need a charismatic leader with a strong voice. The Tories tried to
build a personality cult around a woman who doesn’t have much of a personality.
May is a common or garden Home Counties conservative politician. Her stock in trade
is prudence, caution, and stubbornness. The vicar’s daughter was woefully
miscast as the Robespierre of the Brexit revolution, the embodiment of the
British popular will sending saboteurs to the guillotine. She is awkward,
wooden, and, as it turned out, prone to panic and indecision under pressure.
But to be fair to May, her wavering embodied a much deeper
set of contradictions. Those words she repeated so robotically, “strong and
stable,” would ring just as hollow in the mouth of any other Conservative
politician. This is a party that has plunged its country into an existential
crisis because it was too weak to stand up to a minority of nationalist zealots
and tabloid press barons. It is as strong as a jellyfish and as stable as a
flea.
Thirdly, the idea of a single British people united by the
Brexit vote is ludicrous. Not only do Scotland, Northern Ireland, and London
have large anti-Brexit majorities, but many of those who did vote for Brexit
are deeply unhappy about the effects of the Conservative government’s austerity
policies on healthcare, education, and other public services. (One of these
services is policing, and May’s direct responsibility for a reduction in police
numbers neutralized any potential swing toward the Conservatives as a result of
the terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.)
This unrest found a voice in Corbyn’s unabashedly left-wing
Labour manifesto, with its clear promises to end austerity and fund better
public services by taxing corporations and the very wealthy. May’s appeal to
“the people” as a mystic entity came up against Corbyn’s appeal to real people
in their daily lives, longing not for a date with national destiny but for a
good school, a functioning National Health Service, and decent public
transport. Phony populism came up against a more genuine brand of
anti-establishment radicalism that convinced the young and the marginalized
that they had something to come out and vote for.
In electoral terms, of course, the two forces have pretty
much canceled each other out. May will form a government with the support of
the Protestant fundamentalist Democratic Unionist Party from Northern Ireland.
That government will be weak and unstable and it will have no real authority to
negotiate a potentially momentous agreement with the European Union. Brexit is
thus far from being a done deal: it can’t be done without a reliable partner
for the EU to negotiate with. There isn’t one now and there may not be one for
quite some time—at least until after another election, but quite probably not
even then. The reliance on a spurious notion of the “popular will” has left
Britain with no clear notion of who “the people” are and what they really want.
June 10, 2017, 6:48 pm
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