Brexit, je t’aime

All our resentments conveniently expressed in one word

We shall leave them on the beaches… Photo by Antoine Schibler on Unsplash

Sexual intercourse began in 1963, between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. If you don’t believe me, you can look up Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis, which I’ve just misquoted. I’m talking about the UK, of course.

Big events — and big changes in attitudes (to sex, in this example) — happen between other events. They can be tracked to a moment. Hold that thought.

Blah blah blah bananas

The process that led to Brexit began in 1973, when the UK first joined — and first started grumbling about — the European Economic Community that became the European Union (I’ll just call it the EU from here on). We grumbled and we grumbled and we grumbled, Margaret Thatcher said “Non! Non! Non!”, and finally, in an effort to stop the grumbling, David Cameron offered a referendum on whether we wanted to stay in the EU.

Then we went to war with each other. In the background was the ongoing “death of deference”, whereby we ceased to respect our leaders, and our leaders became people not only with feet of clay, but made entirely of clay. Nobody was an authority, so everybody was an authority.

Blah blah blah. Social media kicked in big-time. We voted. By the rules of the referendum, we’d voted for Brexit. So we argued about the rules. If you counted the non-voters as preferring the status quo, we hadn’t voted for Brexit. So we needed a second referendum…

…and so on. I don’t want to get into the specifics of the debate, because the point I want to make is simply this. The term “Brexit” was invented at roughly the time of the referendum. It is therefore true to say:

“Brexit began in 2016, between a lot of grumbling about being a member of the EU, and a lot of grumbling about not being a member of the EU.” Brexit was like stepping through a mirror: same after as before, but exactly the other way round. Remember Maastricht and the ERM? Straight bananas?

It seems to me that any competent political class would be able to achieve a mutually beneficial relationship with the EU regardless of the UK’s precise membership status. But never mind that. Yes, I did use bold-italic type for the word competent — oops, twice now. We could be Switzerland.

It was Brexit wot did it

Brexit began in 2016, between the Lehmann collapse, the global banking crisis, austerity, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Paris Agreement on carbon emissions, terrorist attacks on Paris (Je suis Charlie) … and the election of President Trump, the launch of TikTok, the global Covid-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the cancelling of Roe v Wade, and the arrival of ChatGPT.

Between the global banking collapse and the global pandemic. But we still talk about Brexit as though it’s the biggest cause of all our problems. We weren’t hit by the near-collapse of the global financial system, but by Brexit. We weren’t hit by Covid’s shutdown of the entire world economy, but by Brexit. How come?

I suspect that Brexit is a proxy for what’s really bothering us — which is the clumsy incompetent callous unresponsive deep state and its feet-of-clay incompetent figureheads. This is how we do revolutions these days: through a gradual welling-up of anger tagged to a divisive issue. All the diatribes about Brexit, all the anger and the calling-out and the occasional vindictiveness, are about everything else as well.

Whether the aristocrats are “brexiteers” or whatever we mean by “the liberal elite”, we really just want to be jeering at them as they’re rolled off in the tumbrils to the guillotine.

A fine example of contemporary Brexit literature is Umair Haque’s recent epic. Is Britain Finally Ready To Admit Brexit Was a (Catastrophic) Mistake? It’s an 11-minute read. His brackets.

The death of deference in the UK is commonly traced back to the satire boom of the sixties. Deference has been dead for a long time, and not just in the UK. See for example everywhere else.

This is short. You might like it.

[embed]Voyage to the Brave New World “Ladies and gentlemen, now that the initial panic has died down, I urge you to return to your cabins.medium.com