In the whirling maelstrom of Brexit, it is difficult to make any assertion that hasn’t succumbed to obsolescence within twenty four hours. When I visit this subject, I try not to get snarled up in the twists and turns of politics and process (very importantly here when discussing Westminster), and post something that has a better chance of remaining valid for some reasonable period of time. So in this blog I’ll begin by invoking Shakespeare, who has demonstrated pretty good staying power for over four centuries now.
A former English teacher of mine taught me about how Shakespearean villains often grow into their role. As in, they’re typically not evil incarnate from the beginning of the play (I’ll leave you to consider whether or not Iago and Richard III conform to that general remark. I’ll leave you further to consider whether or not Richard III was the victim of a Tudor-influenced hit job by the Bard). In King Lear, for example, the ungrateful daughters Goneril and Regan aren’t wholly evil to begin with. They are deeply cynical, of course, but they have their reasons to obsequiously flatter and manipulate their vain and foolish father. They even have their reasons for marginalising him once they have the power to do so. It is later in the play, as it descends to treachery and murder, that they really begin to find depths of wickedness. There are similar observations to be made regarding mass atrocities. What starts off as persecution in relative peacetime usually only lurches to mass killings leading to genocide when the bombs are going off, which is one reason among many why avoiding wars is a good idea.
This brings me to the subject of arch-Brexiters. I hope very much to be able to write a blog about their failure soon, but there still remain dangerous hours ahead. Now before discussing their dreadfulness here, one should acknowledge the presence of Tony Blair on the Remain side, and plenty of pious liberals who have been intensely relaxed in the past about supporting foreign wars. In my defence, I have covered that ground already.
It was the adviser to former Tory leader William Hague, Daniel Finkelstein, who famously joked that Tory Eurosceptics were people who “wouldn’t take ‘Yes’ for an answer.” This was despite Hague arguably being something of an appeaser of the Europhobic tendency in the Tory party, following the continuous savaging his predecessor John Major endured, leading Major to hit out at the “bastards” in his cabinet.
The journey the Conservative Party has embarked on in the 21st century demonstrates very well why indulging extremists is a losing game, particularly when one examines the leadership of the insouciant David Cameron. Pulling the Tories out of the European People’s Party grouping in the European Parliament and joining a new grouping with less respectable parties of the right, a promise he made when running for the leadership, was one of those tactical manoeuvres he used to make that was ultimately lacking in all strategic wisdom. The right of his party simply banked that and kept coming, its appetite increasingly insatiable. However, that was but a minor error compared to the referendum on EU membership he called, ostensibly for party management reasons, and to ward off the Faragist Ukip threat.
I won’t attempt to diagnose what happened in the referendum in this post. I have written about it before, and will surely do so again. But there are observations people are increasingly making about the shifting meaning of Brexit, and to which I will add my tuppence worth here. It hadn’t escaped my notice that Nigel Farage used his many media appearances before the referendum to talk up the “Norway option”, and that Daniel Hannan, who passes for being one of the leading intellectual figures behind Brexit, said that “absolutely no-one is talking about threatening our place in the single market”. Since the referendum, what Leavers want, and constitutes a “hard” Brexit has been significantly altered in the discourse, as various cute and clever attempts at phrasing have led us to the land of “pure” Brexit and “clean” Brexit.
That Theresa May has been a disastrous Prime Minister, historically so, is a widespread view now. There are multiple reasons for that – her appalling negotiating skills that are traceable to how utterly unsuited she is to being Prime Minister, her monomaniacal attitude to immigration that heavily informed her troublesome red lines, and her devotion to a party that has become feral and downright crazed. On that latter point, there has plainly been a ratcheting up of extreme positioning. Ken Clarke’s customs union proposal was narrowly defeated during last week’s indicative votes in the House of Commons. A few years ago that would have been regarded as a hardish Brexit outcome, all their Christmases coming at once for anti-Europeans – now the so called European Research Group would decry that as a “betrayal”, and “not what 17.4 million people voted for”.
That latter phrase has surely already acquired the status of ‘old favourite’. If you want a proper dissection of why it is deceitful, there is someone on Twitter who tweets under the name Steve Analyst, and who is what you might term a master threader. In a magisterial humiliation of Piers Morgan last week, he explained why this Brexit thing has meant lots of things, usually whatever is expedient at the time. Quite a lot of people in 2016 were saying things quite soft Brexity that they certainly aren’t saying now. Steve has also recently explained the process around referendums, and why another one would be perfectly democratic. And of course it would be, when you factor in the information deficit that prevailed in 2016, the foreign interference, and all that criminality that occurred then.
There are other narrative developments that are explained by this ratchet effect. They are also explained by the observation of the American writer Joan Didion when covering the 1988 presidential election campaign, that politics was effectively a subset of show business. Here the UK media has failed miserably. One doesn’t expect much from propaganda outlets owned by foreign and non-domiciled proprietors. But the BBC is in a sorry state as a news organisation, having chosen to participate in the entertainment spectacle (with a notable Leave bias) rather than joining the struggle to uphold news values. To take but one example (we’ll save the decline of the Today Programme for another post), Nigel Farage has made well over thirty appearances on Question Time, while the likes of Seb Dance, Alyn Smith and any number of other MEPs who have tried to honourably serve in the European Parliament have consistently been ignored. Why has that happened? Why also has someone so bumptious and unpleasant as Mark Francois been given his 15 minutes?
You don’t need to be told these people are revelling in their moment. They are growing into their roles with each miserable week, and the media is feeding it. The most startling transformation of all is that of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Three years ago, he was viewed as a somewhat affectionate “character”, a posh mascot for a country with a weakness for such people. Now he is a faintly sinister figure making unsavoury friends in what is now a very internationalist global far right. Lately, as it appears he might be thwarted for the time being, he has been issuing threats about what the UK could do to obstruct the EU in the case of a long extension. The UK is clearly more sovereign than he has been letting on with his arcane historical analogies.
How might one conclude on this? I suppose there are political opponents you compromise and cooperate with, and there are political opponents you have no choice but to seek to vanquish. Abraham Lincoln wasn’t conciliatory with the political leaders of the Confederacy at the end of the American Civil War, and eventually rough terms will need to apply to the noisy hard right if the UK is to ever purge the poison that has been steadily injected into its body politic over the previous thirty years.
thecrimsonfeather 