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"In exploring the answers to the question: 'why did Britain vote leave?', Fintan O'Toole finds himself discovering how trivial journalistic lies became far from trivial national obsessions; how the pose of indifference to truth and historical fact has come to define the style of an entire political elite; how a country that once had colonies is redefining itself as an oppressed nation requiring liberation; the strange gastronomic and political significance of prawn-flavoured crisps, and their role in the rise of Boris Johnson; the dreams of revolutionary deregulation and privatisation that drive Arron Banks, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg; and the silent rise of English nationalism, the force that dare not speak its name. He also discusses the fatal attraction of herioc failure, once a self-deprecating cult in a hugely successful empire that could well afford the occasional disaster: the Charge of the Light Brigade, or Franklin lost in the Arctic. Now failure is no longer heroic--it is just failure, and its terrible costs will be paid by the most vulnerable of Brexit's supporters, and by those who may suffer the consequences of a hard border in Ireland and the breakdown of a fragile peace."--Page 2 of cover.… (more)
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Fintan O'Toole's fine book looks at that mess, and sets it in its correct historical place - Brexit, after all, did not emerge from nothing, but rather seems to have stemmed from something that is innate in Englishness. Note that I do not say Britishness - and O'Toole makes this the central point in his concluding chapters, suggesting that, in the way that Brexit marks the rewinding of colonial history, the time must surely be arriving when the English will embrace their nationality, instead of subsuming it within the larger, though indistinct, notion of Britain.
Overall, a tremendously good book.
Johnson’s jokes about the EU and, Germany’s, and his expansionist plans, captures the general sense of distrust in England. I think the obsession with
Nobody can actually tell when the British Empire ended (I can tell you when the Portuguese Empire ended though). People cite WW2, the Suez Crisis and the return of Hong Kong to China. Indeed Brexit might be its end. Because of the empire went out with a whimper rather than a bang there was never really a moment to reflect on the good and the bad. Both are key. Brexit has shown up the lack of confidence some British people have in their own country and culture. When your national dish is curry then it's more difficult to identify what is that makes you British. And this complex has prevented Britain from taking a more active role in the EU. But the country that was the center of one of the greatest empires should be full of confidence. Equally however many British are completely unaware of the negative aspects of the empire and seem to think it was some kind benevolent conqueror rather than actively engaged in ethnic cleansings (like all empires).
The result is this kind of uneasy arrogance. Like the school bully who is abused at home. Britain is about to get a good kicking thanks to people, mainly English, whose sense of superiority has not caught up with realpolitik.
Johnson seeks to define Britain's relationship with the EU as a war. So for Tosser Johnson, the EU is the enemy and anyone who isn't on Johnson's side is a 'collaborator'. So, the English should get ready for food rationing. Johnson is a fucking idiot. I am proud to say I am a citizen of the world and a collaborator with the EU. Tosser Johnson does not speak for me. At the coming snap Brexit election, were I English, I’d vote for a party that would unambiguously support remaining in the EU. And so should all remainers.
Johnson has no intention of getting a deal. The deal that is acceptable to the Brexiter cultists does not and cannot exist, and is impossible to achieve because they are still fully immersed in their cake-ist delusion. The only option left for Johnson is to go for broke with a GE win by blaming the EU for not giving the British the cake that they voted for. By creating and repeating the same massive, but carefully focused, lie that No Deal is the fault of the EU they hope to attract enough of Brexit votes to get a majority. And given how easily fooled the leave voting public are he might very well win unless the opposition sort themselves out and stop their petty in fighting.
O'Toole writes from the point of view of a critical outsider with a sharp eye for literary and cultural subtexts and a long experience of the newspaper world. He lays into Boris Johnson's lies with gusto and obvious enjoyment (but still manages to underestimate Johnson's capacity for bouncing back from deep disgrace into public life...), whilst drawing interesting parallels between Johnson's style and that of Enoch Powell.
Whilst O'Toole is no enthusiast for the EU (he hasn't forgiven it for what it did to Greece, Ireland and Portugal after the financial crisis), he is clear that leaving it can be nothing other than a major act of self-harm for the UK. But intentional self-harm can be a very attractive thing in certain situations — he's at least half-serious when he draws a parallel with the popularity of Fifty shades of grey, and very serious when he argues that Brexit is the same kind of self-defeating rebellion as punk. When you feel powerless to change things, an act of self-harm puts you in a position to make yourself the centre of attention.
And of course this links into the English cult of heroic failure, which he sees as a way for a dominant, colonising nation to appropriate the moral high-ground of the colonial victims — the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott of the Antarctic, Sir John Franklin and the North-West Passage, Michael Caine and the Zulus, etc. Johnson opportunistically took up "Leave" in the certainty that it would be a glorious flop and that his "selfless" engagement with it would earn him credit with a large section of the party. O'Toole quotes Sarah Vine's famous comment to her husband Michael Gove on the morning after the referendum: ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ — a line from The Italian job, a film whose relevance to Brexit O'Toole also has a lot of fun deconstructing.
The book concludes with a warning that the Leave vote overwhelmingly came from people who self-identify as "English" rather than "British", and who feel the current political system in the UK doesn't take any account of that identity. O'Toole urges politicians on the left and centre to find a way to talk to those people and take English nationalism away from the exclusive province of the far right before it's too late. Presumably his next book will be about how Jeremy Corbyn failed to do that...
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