This current divide must be especially sad for the Tories. The idea that Europe, the place where they buy their cheese, the place where they took their first five mistresses on minibreaks, the place where they cried at Hitler’s bunker, this collection of potential second homes, this was the place that tore them apart. And so we have a Conservative leadership election, a sort of X Factor for choosing the antichrist. Already, the cast looks like the episode of Come Dine With Me they show in hell before Top Gear comes on.
Stephen Crabb has come under fire for links to a group that claims it can cure homosexuality, and, having had a quick look at him, he’s definitely cured me: his beaming face is like a grim party game where blindfolded children have to try to place the eyes on to an identikit photograph of a murderer.
The frontrunner, Theresa May, communicates something horrifying, not through her appearance, but rather her unique expression of unwavering, furious disgust. It is the expression some nameless, pitiless archon will wear 50 years from now as it signs a contract to rent out our city centres to pharmaceutical companies so they can crop-spray viruses and harvest antibodies from any survivors. It is the expression Lucifer wore when the other angels attempted an intervention. Surely May, of all people, could make a positive case for migration just by saying: “If you can’t see the potential of a free-moving workforce, simply imagine how great it would be if I fucked off somewhere else.” Bizarrely, it looks like she’ll be involved in a runoff against Andrea Leadsom, who was created by Nazi scientists as a response to Dame Vera Lynn.
Michael Gove needs to get 50 signatures, but at the moment he doesn’t look like he could persuade his mother to sign him off a cross-country run after a leukaemia diagnosis. And then there’s Liam Fox. I seem to remember some sort of opprobrium being attached to him. Whatever it was, no doubt there can’t have been much to it (even though he was forced to resign or something) or it wouldn’t be getting comprehensively buried every news cycle by Jeremy Corbyn not indicating when leaving a roundabout or something.
Now that it’s over, the idea that Boris was ever going to be prime minister seems like an act of collective madness. If Boris was the answer, then what on earth was the question? Why should I check whether my boiler is leaking carbon monoxide? Of course, the thing about media commentators saying that Boris won’t even clean up the mess he’s made is that most of us have cleaners, but I think the point still stands.
But are we really to believe that he abandoned the ambition of his entire adult life because Michael Gove’s wife thought it might not be a good idea? That a man who pursues sex and food like a cautionary character in a Roald Dahl novel suddenly discovered discretion when it came to the lure of power and narcissistic fulfilment? No, Boris will have been warned not to stand with a gesture so subtle it will have been recognised only by him: a single word whispered in an elevator, one wrong note in an opera, a friendly wave from a black-cab driver, or that front page and double inside spread they ran in the Sun explicitly stating that he would be destroyed.
In any case, the real issue is that a country led by such an autoparodic figure would have been tough for satirical columnists. Commentating on the Johnson administration would have been like writing a cutting review of a dancing dog. Which, of course, is exactly the sort of thing I used to do when I had a column in the Sun, but I very much doubt I could sustain it on a weekly basis over the life of a five-year parliament.
Sadly, it seems that the only people in Britain who truly have more that unites them than divides them are the parliamentary Labour and Conservative parties. The PLP wants rid of Jeremy Corbyn, showing all the patience of Prince waiting for his paracetamol to kick in. They say they need a leader who knows how to oppose, albeit primarily their own party membership. The idea is that Corbyn is unelectable, and it’s just one of life’s sad ironies that none of the people who believe this will be able to beat him in an election. I suppose it’s worth following this argument to its conclusion: his unelectability stems from him having failed to secure enough support for something the general public decided to vote against.
With the Chilcot report about to be published, presumably the PLP will have to find a candidate they find acceptable, but who didn’t vote for the Iraq war, which narrows the field down to people who didn’t enter politics until after the war. This will create the unique challenge of having to win what is, let’s face it, a popularity contest with someone who, by definition, nobody will ever have heard of. Of course, the report itself will be a disappointment to anyone wanting anything like truth or justice, but it will nonetheless be damaging for Labour because, well, there just isn’t enough whitewash in the world.
One of the PLP’s main worries will be that Labour’s vote will crumble to Ukip under Corbyn, who won’t produce enough racist mugs and mouse mats to reassure everybody. And, to be fair, it must be galling to a party that invaded Iraq, rendered Libyans to be tortured by Gaddafi and detained asylum seekers with Dickensian cruelty to lose voters on the race issue.
I think it’s understandable at moments like this to long for a return to the status quo, but let’s remember that the status quo, whatever its advantages and disadvantages, was not survivable. We cannot survive an endless escalation of inequality, not even physically. Many areas that voted to leave Europe will probably within our lifetimes be forming a much more challenging union with the sea. Neoliberalism has taken a stranglehold on our societies by seeing chaotic events as opportunities. Well, maybe we should take this opportunity to do something decent. To elect a government that will retain the best parts of EU legislation and strengthen them in the direction of workers, rather than corporations. There is a reason that so many banks, multinationals and, of course, the United States feared Brexit. I think if I had to say what the most feared thing in the course of human history is, it’s probably a good example.
Admittedly, many leave voters were not inspiring, and seemed to contain a large group of people who think shouting “COMMON SENSE” overrides studying economics to degree level. But remain ran an almost incomprehensible campaign. The central idea was that Britain needed to be fully involved and engaged in Europe so that it had enough power to stay completely on the fringes. Then they got businesses and banks to tell everybody it was a good idea, hoping that the public would enjoy being told how to vote by the people who gambled their house and job into a digitised void for cocaine money.
The most remarkable thing was the sheer narrowness and uniformity of the debate. If you fight propaganda with propaganda, you end up with simplistic discourse where truth is not a priority. Let’s not forget that it was actually Gove who sought to engage a distrust of experts. What if evidence-based policy ideas are coming up against a public that is not actually sceptical of experts, but of public relations? Of advice generated by thinktanks and advisory bodies that are either simply created to be biased or refracted through the prism of media organisations that struggle to recognise their own systemic bias? A news media that regularly portrays commentators with vested interests as impartial and thinktanks with neoliberal sympathies as neutral obviously runs the risk of losing its audience’s trust. It’s not the whole story, but perhaps this is a part of what has happened.
I also wonder if decades of this has created a culture where we confuse rhetoric with reality. Saying we’re under siege by immigrants shouldn’t have any more weight as a metaphor than “Britannia rules the waves” (we share an aircraft carrier with France). We’re entering a time where all attempts at honesty are radical and can only hope to alienate both sides of an argument. Public intellectuals have been replaced by public morons, drama by musicals and comedy by mere seriousness. The referendum was an exchange of rhetorical ordnance, as smoothed and uniform as artillery shells.
The main campaigns were a pitched battle between two very slightly different types of racism, while the liberal alternatives dismissed leave voters with the same preprogrammed classist pomposity you would expect from Conservatives.
Let’s just try to imagine for a second what a broader debate might have involved. Personally, I doubt that Brexit will be a financial disaster in itself.
The City of London is a giant money-laundering pirate zeppelin, so Britain can’t be punished by the troika in the same way as the Greeks were because a) London is too useful to them and b) they don’t all own flats in Greece. Also, the same factors that caused the last financial crash here are being stoked up again. In a debate supposedly about things like trade and sovereignty, you’d think this might have come up somewhere.
Equally, there is an antifascist case to be made for leaving the EU. Yes, there will be an upswell in racism in Britain in the short term, as some of the worst, most damaged people in our society will feel empowered by this result. I’d suggest the best defence against this is the rule of law, and the insistence that it is applied in every instance of racial hate crime. Yet, the far right in Britain is still a tiny, disorganised minority, while a lot of Europe are voting in far-right parties – Finland, Hungary (to be fair, countries that still associate socialism with only being able to visit their dad on the one day a year when his gulag thawed). EU elections are a vital part of their growth cycles, and the issue of EU membership itself a useful recruiting issue. I’m not saying these are the most air-tight arguments in the world; the point I’m making is that I seem mad for asking you to consider them.
To reach other people with honesty involves risk, and in our media we seem to be risking communication a lot less and watching each other bake a lot more. Culturally, it’s now like the very idea of taking a risk is seen as bad form, which seems remarkable in a country where the economy essentially revolves around gambling. Telling someone your real opinion is supposed to be a risk, telling them a joke is supposed to be a risk, kissing someone for the first time, it’s all a risk. And what would life be without original thought, without laughter, without love? Well, there are some people who are really quite keen to show us, just as soon as they get their little leadership election out of the way. Maybe we should start to talk to each other honestly about what we’re going to do about that.