There was recently a debate on Bluesky, my favourite echo-chamber (other than the WEB). Actually, it wasn’t really a debate because we pretty much all agreed. That’s Bluesky for you where, just this week, I have achieved 1,000 followers! Yes, I hear you say, so what? I ditched X a while ago – it was just too horrid.
The talking point was that the EU should have made more concessions to Cameron when he conducted his – in my opinion – absurd renegotiation with the EU in early 2016.
That Lewis Goodall, an intelligent and perceptive man, should have found himself agreeing with some desperate Labour MP pushing this ludicrous victim narrative was disappointing, to say the least, but it illustrates where we find ourselves today.
The young and the better informed are overwhelmingly of the view that Brexit was a bad policy that has weakened Britain politically and economically. Even the Labour Party appears to admit as much, but then we are told that there is nothing we can do about it unless the EU helps us.
Brexit addiction
Labour’s policy is that we’d like to have a better relationship with Europe, but it can only be on our terms. I have always said that their EU policy is akin to an overweight man claiming he wants to lose weight, but he’s already ruled out healthy eating and exercise which means, of course, that he doesn’t really want to lose weight at all and remains in hock to his addiction.
And Labour policy on Europe is a bit like an addiction. They know it’s a rotten policy and it’s effectively self-harm, but renouncing it is just too painful. Hence all the evasive, self-justificatory gibberish about ‘relitigating Brexit’ and ‘reopening old wounds’ that Labour MPs have been told to regurgitate in order to shut down all discussion of the most disastrous foreign policy decision since appeasement.
I see recognising the need to rejoin the EU as very similar to an alcoholic admitting his addiction and taking steps to put it behind him. Giving up booze is painful and the drinker will all too often pretend to himself that he can drink ‘normally’ (make Brexit work). But the longer he clings to this delusion the worse things get. He’s often enabled by friends and relatives who cover up for him – “Uncle Reggie is feeling a bit unwell today”. No, he isn’t, he is ratted again.
Brexit is the ultimate addiction and the ultimate delusion. The very idea that Britain’s destiny is not in Europe ignores our entire history. In 1940, Churchill proposed a union with France to resist Nazi Germany. In 2016, 52% of voters were persuaded that (not so) splendid isolation was the way forward and we didn’t need a close union with the rest of Europe to face up to the challenges of a hostile world. It was considered quite reasonable to walk away if we couldn’t have everything on our terms; for English exceptionalists, the notion of compromise is anathema.
Linguistic isolation
There are many reasons for this isolationism (and there are too many to list here). One is an almost total ignorance of European languages, which prevents Britons from truly penetrating the culture of our neighbours. This was not always the case: the dominance of English as a lingua franca is a recent phenomenon. When I first travelled to France, Germany, Italy, and Spain you had to make the effort to speak the language, so you just did. English is now so widely spoken that people have convinced themselves that learning the language is a waste of time and far too difficult (who wants to wrestle with direct and indirect objects and the subjunctive?). This means that we are isolated linguistically.
A selective view of history
If linguistic exceptionalism is devastating, so too is a depressing ignorance of our own history. For the Brexit mindset, our past is reduced to a fake narrative stressing national pride: imperialism and defeating the French and Spanish and then the Germans. Jacob Rees-Mogg reckons we won all the battles – I kid you not – and many Brexiters fetishise the two world wars in a quite extraordinary way. There is no realisation that our whole extremely complex and nuanced, history has been inextricably linked with the rest of Europe. Often, we were no more than a bit player, and going it alone was never a real possibility. Waterloo was, after all, “a near run thing”.
This is all the more depressing when it becomes evident that our politicians are, for the most part, ignorant of history and languages. And – this is really appalling – these are subjects that are being cut because they are seen as at best optional and at worst worthless, and not as important as those vital STEM subjects and the vocational qualifications we never seem to get right.
Of course, there are some politicians who grudgingly claim to accept our true nature but, as I mentioned above, any relationship with the EU still has to be on our terms. Freedom of movement is rejected out of hand, although it is not an issue in the rest of Europe. More Europeans now leave Germany than arrive, and numbers have been falling for years, but we are British and we can’t have it just because some people in the Red Wall think it’s bad. The Daily Mail told them freedom of movement pushed their wages down, but have they gone up since Brexit?
We Britons are just different
Sovereignty remains an obsession but, apart from a few useless trade deals, nobody can explain exactly why – it just is. And that is the root of the problem: this fuzzy, unexplainable belief that we are different from the rest of Europe in a way that the Germans are not different from the Italians, the French, and the Poles. Of course, there was a time when the Germans felt similarly different and superior. I seem to remember a certain former corporal running the show, and it didn’t end well.
I yearn for a British politician with the honesty to speak truth to the country, but I fear it’s far easier to appease exceptionalism and xenophobia and muddle along.
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