Fintan O'Toole: Brexit in one way alone has done a real service

BREXIT is the result of the invisible subsidence of the political order over decades. If you think like this, it makes sense to see Brexit as a reassertion of the true English character, a last-gasp rescuing of its distinctiveness from the incoming tides of Euro-blandness.

And thus to see self-parodying eccentrics like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, not just as saviours of this endangered Englishness, but embodiments of it.

READ MORE: Fintan O'Toole: The potential for Scotland to be a new kind of state

Eccentricity was a revolt against the tyranny of conformity. The more it flourished, the more the English could distinguish themselves as a nation of free-thinkers.

The idea of eccentricity has a long history as a signifier of English freedom. England’s glorying in eccentrics (actually only those of the male and upper-class variety), so the story went, contrasted favourably with the conformism of slavish continentals and was thus a kind of personal tribute to the virtues of the English constitution and character.

This idea had more than an element of religious prejudice. Protestants thought for themselves, while Catholics (especially the French) were mindless followers of authority.

Eccentricity was the proof of the value England placed on individualism: only in England could you be free to behave in a manner that most of society regarded as odd. John Stuart Mill, the great theorist of British liberalism, was quite explicit about this. In On Liberty he wrote that: ‘‘Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric” (Mill, 1859).

Eccentricity was a revolt against the tyranny of conformity. The more it flourished, the more the English could distinguish themselves as a nation of free-thinkers and portray England (and hence Britain) as not what it actually is: a normal European country.

The English masses

OF course, this was always a myth. In the 1940s, George Orwell evoked a self-image of the English masses that was the opposite of eccentric: “the gentle-mannered, undemonstrative, law-abiding English … the orderly behaviour of English crowds, the lack of pushing and quarrelling, the willingness to form queues” (Orwell, 1947: 202).

Perhaps the English valued their eccentrics precisely because they were actually much more obedient and orthodox than they liked to acknowledge. In any case, upper-class male eccentricity was meant to be free of damage – the invariable modifier of “eccentric” in the English language was “harmless”.

And so it was: when your ruling class is running a vast empire and your practical industrialists are leading the world, you can afford a decorative eccentric or two.

The eccentric Englishman was a self-conscious indulgence, a way of disguising the relentless reality of global domination. The English liked to see even their empire, not as a ruthless machine, but as an almost accidental side effect of curious gentlemen wandering off the beaten track.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

Brexit has a way of reviving habits of mind that no longer conform to reality. Except this time there is a twist, the harmless eccentric has mutated into the harmful kind.

The rise to prominence of an eccentric Eurosceptic Toryism can be seen as some sort of heritage industry play: a sort of geo-political farce in the style of Downton Abbey, but that would be to mistake style and code for substance.

While the former have a familiarity and even comfort in evoking past cultural norms and the ritual humiliation of the masses, what this is being used for in the uber-Brexiteer vision is a Britain and England of Them and Us which is both utopian and dystopian, and drawing from the past to import Britain into a turbo-charged, free-wheeling, deal-making, spivs-on-steroids version of the future.

It is the collective responsibility of numerous different forces in Britain that it has had such traction. Step forward the British Labour Party and what went wrong long before Jeremy Corbyn, the LibDems, and the timidity of too many constitutional reformers through the years.

What went wrong with Britain?

THE other afterlife that is in front of us is that of Britain itself: the state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland – a name and territory it has only held from 1922.

There have been successive rebellions and mutinies in the last two generations, most obviously the Scottish and Welsh experiments in self-government, and the Northern Irish trauma of the 30-year troubles.

Post-1997, Edinburgh, Cardiff and, in a more stop-start way, Belfast, have developed as alternative political centres with their own dynamics and heartbeats – and agendas increasingly ignored and found incomprehensible by the heart of the British political state. It is not a way to run a sustainable state in the long run.

It may seem strange to call this slow collapse invisible since so much of it is obvious: the deep uncertainties about the union after the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and the establishment of the Scottish Parliament the following year; the consequent rise of English nationalism; the profound regional inequalities within England itself; the generational divergence of values and aspirations; the undermining of the welfare state and its promise of shared citizenship; the contempt for the poor and vulnerable expressed through austerity; the rise of a sensationally self-indulgent and clownish ruling class.

But the collective effects of these interrelated developments seem to have been barely visible within the political mainstream until David Cameron accidentally took the lid off by calling the EU referendum and asking people to endorse the status quo. What we see with the mask pulled back and the fog of fantasies at last beginning to dissipate is the revelation that Brexit is much less about Britain’s relationship with the EU than it is about Britain’s relationship with itself.

It is the projection outwards of an inner turmoil.

An archaic political system carried on even while its foundations in a collective sense of belonging were crumbling. Brexit in one way alone has done a real service: it has forced the old system to play out its death throes in public.

The spectacle is ugly, but at least it shows that a fissiparous four-nation state cannot be governed without radical social and constitutional change.

In the aftermath of June 2016 the EU have continually expressed exasperation that the British have really been negotiating not with them, but with each other.

But perhaps it is time to recognise that there is a useful truth in this.

Brexit is really just the vehicle that has delivered a fraught state to a place where it can no longer pretend to be a settled and functioning democracy. Brexit’s work is done – everyone can now see that Westminster is dead.

It is time to move on from the pretence that the problem with British democracy is the EU and to recognise that it is with itself.

After Brextinction there must be a whole new political ecosystem. Drop the dead dodo, end the mad race for a meaningless prize, and start talking about who you want to be, entailing the architecture that connects and relates the peoples of the four nations of the UK and which dismantles the rotten, decaying pretensions and illusions at the centre of political power.

Easier said than done when even in a floundering and collapsing edifice ruling elites never give up their place and importance voluntarily. Even in late crisis and the world of afterlives it is going to require effort.

After Brexit

ACROSS this archipelago we have responsibilities beyond our own territorial politics: first, to map out and connect the emerging politics of self-government and self-determination while seeing the search for statehood as not an end in itself but a desire for a different politics and idea of the state.

Second, the Brexit debacle is fast tracking numerous issues that are a mixture of bubbling under, supposedly under control, stuck in constitutional permafrost, or supposedly decided or “parked” by the centre.

The most obvious are the Scottish and Northern Irish questions, but there will be numerous issues that emerge on the other side of any Brexit that we can only at the moment guess at.

Finally, there is the question for all of us about what future beckons for England. Some of my interventions on Brexit have met the response that I am caricaturing England to the extent that a comparison would be to attempt to understand Ireland through the eyes of the IRA (Goodhart, 2019).

The point I have been trying to get over is that the English political imagination, or accurately, a noisy, influential section of it, has been captured by forces who offer a caricature of England: of unreconstructed history, of Us and Them, and a politics which is anti-modern, intolerant, and anti-democratic.

This essay comes from Scotland The Brave? Twenty Years Of Change And The Politics Of The Future, edited by Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow, published by Luath Press, £14.99.

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