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It was never about Europe. Brexit is Britain’s reckoning
with itself
Fintan O'Toole
Brexit is just the vehicle by which a fractured state has
come to realise that its politics are no longer fit for purpose
Fri 18 Jan 2019 06.00 GMT Last modified on Fri 18 Jan 2019
14.22 GMT
Illustration by Ben Jennings
At least the Sun thrives on chaos. The savage parliamentary
mauling of Britain’s withdrawal agreement with the European Union allowed
Rupert Murdoch’s pet tabloid to unveil on Wednesday morning a front page of
grandly gleeful malevolence. Under the headline Brextinct, it conjured a creepy
chimera of Theresa May’s head pasted on to the body of a dodo. But the thing
about such surreal pictures is that it is not easy to control their
interpretation. From the outside, this one seemed to suggest much more than the
immediately intended message that both May and her deal are politically dead.
When, it prompted one to ask, did Brextinction really happen? Was this strange
creature ever really alive or was it not always a grotesquely Photoshopped
image of something else, a crisis of belonging that has attached itself to the
wrong union? Do the events of this week point us, not towards the EU, but to
the travails of a radically disunited kingdom?
The dodo, after all, may be proverbially dead but it has a
vivid afterlife in that great trawl of the English unconscious, Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is the Dodo, when various characters have
fallen into a pool of tears, who suggests how they might dry themselves – the
Caucus-race. “There was no ‘One, two, three, and away’, but they began running
when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know
when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so,
and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out, ‘The race is over!’ and
they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’”
This seems, this week more than ever, a perfect description
of the state to which British politics has been reduced – a lot of frantically
anarchic running overseen by a defunct creature, the Brextinct dodo. And who
has won? Carroll’s Dodo, of course, decrees: “Everybody has won, and all must
have prizes.” Having emptied Alice’s pockets to provide rewards for everyone
else, the Dodo solemnly presents her with the only thing that’s left: her own
thimble. “We beg your acceptance of this elegant thimble.”
The Brexit game is patently not worth the thimble to be
presented at the end of it. Yet in Theresa May’s humiliation on Tuesday, there
were prizes for almost everybody else: a glimpse of opportunity for her rivals
in cabinet; a revival of their sadomasochistic no-deal fantasies for the
zealots; the hope of a second referendum for remainers; proof of the
near-collapse of the Westminster order for nationalists; the hope of a general
election for Jeremy Corbyn. But in truth nobody has won anything – it is a
losing game all round.
For all of this is the afterlife of dead things. One of them
is Brexit itself. When did Brextinction occur? On 24 June 2016. The project was
driven by decades of camped-up mendacity about the tyranny of the EU, and sold
in the referendum as a fantasy of national liberation. It simply could not
survive contact with reality. It died the moment it became real. You cannot
free yourself from imaginary oppression. Even if May were a political genius –
and let us concede that she is not – Brexit was always going to come down to a
choice between two evils: the heroic but catastrophic failure of crashing out;
or the unheroic but less damaging failure of swapping first-class for
second-class EU membership. These are the real afterlives of a departed
reverie.
If the choice between shooting oneself in the head or in the
foot is the answer to Britain’s long-term problems, surely the wrong question
is being asked. It is becoming ever clearer that Brexit is not about its
ostensible subject: Britain’s relationship with the EU. The very word Brexit contains
a literally unspoken truth. It does not include or even allude to Europe. It is
British exit that is the point, not what it is exiting from. The tautologous
slogan Leave Means Leave is similarly (if unintentionally) honest: the meaning
is in the leaving, not in what is being left or how.
Paradoxically, this drama of departure has really served
only to displace a crisis of belonging. Brexit plays out a conflict between
Them and Us, but it is surely obvious after this week that the problem is not
with Them on the continent. It’s with the British Us, the unravelling of an
imagined community. The visible collapse of the Westminster polity this week
may be a result of Brexit, but Brexit itself is the result of the invisible
subsidence of the political order over recent decades.
It may seem strange to call this slow collapse invisible
since so much of it is obvious: the deep uncertainties about the union after
the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and the establishment of the Scottish
parliament the following year; the consequent rise of English nationalism; the
profound regional inequalities within England itself; the generational
divergence of values and aspirations; the undermining of the welfare state and
its promise of shared citizenship; the contempt for the poor and vulnerable expressed
through austerity; the rise of a sensationally self-indulgent and clownish
ruling class. But the collective effects of these interrelated developments do
seem to have been barely visible within the political mainstream until David
Cameron accidentally took the lid off by calling a referendum and asking people
to endorse the status quo.
What we see with the lid off and the fog of fantasies at
last beginning to dissipate is the truth that Brexit is much less about
Britain’s relationship with the EU than it is about Britain’s relationship with
itself. It is the projection outwards of an inner turmoil. An archaic political
system had carried on even while its foundations in a collective sense of
belonging were crumbling. Brexit in one way alone has done a real service: it
has forced the old system to play out its death throes in public. The spectacle
is ugly, but at least it shows that a fissiparous four-nation state cannot be
governed without radical social and constitutional change.
European leaders have continually expressed exasperation
that the British have really been negotiating not with them, but with each
other. But perhaps it is time to recognise that there is a useful truth in
this: Brexit is really just the vehicle that has delivered a fraught state to a
place where it can no longer pretend to be a settled and functioning democracy.
Brexit’s work is done – everyone can now see that the Westminster dodo is dead.
It is time to move on from the pretence that the problem with British democracy
is the EU and to recognise that it is with itself. After Brextinction there
must be a whole new political ecosystem. Drop the dead dodo, end the mad race
for a meaningless prize, and start talking about who you want to be.
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