Late Friday night, the United Kingdom left the European Union. Within minutes, the power failed all across the nation, people began to starve due to the lack of food, and the shattered remnants of civilization were hurled on the rubbish heap. London is now nothing but a smoking hole in the ground along the banks of the Thames occupied by filthy machete-wielding twitchy-eyed savages. Now that nobody in the UK can read or write, nobody knows how the machines used to work, and all the disgusting medieval diseases are back in full strength, the sun will literally never rise again over those once green and pleasant lands.
Yet, despite the ongoing disasters, a few brave souls still cling to their dim and pathetic hopes of a better world outside the European Union. Here, for example, someone claiming to be Brendan O’Neill smuggled out a story on the last helicopter to take off from the roof of the embassy building (at least, that’s how I assume it got posted to the web…):
Remainers, for their part, are furious about all the talk of parties. We’re rubbing their noses in it, they say. Everything from the Brexit Day gathering in Parliament Square this evening to Sajid Javid’s issuing of a commemorative 50p coin is being cited by the establishment’s bruised, Remoaning anti-democrats as proof of the vile populist streak in the Brexit movement. London mayor Sadiq Khan is even fretting that tonight’s Brexit bashes could give rise to xenophobic hate crimes.
Of course he is. That’s how they see us: as a pogrom-in-waiting. As a racist blob. As an unthinking mass driven almost entirely by hatred of the Other. They’ve been hurling these insults at us, at the millions of men and women who voted for Brexit, for three-and-a-half years now.
But all sides in the Brexit Day discussion are wrong. Baker and other timid Brexiteers are wrong to suggest we should play down the significance of this day lest we offend Remainers, and the Brexitphobic wing of the elite is wrong to say these celebrations are a screech of populist arrogance against the defeated side in the referendum. No, the reason this day must be marked — loudly, firmly and colourfully — is because it represents a glorious victory for democracy. What is being celebrated today is the defence of democracy against one of the greatest threats it has faced in modern times.
One of the peculiarities of the Brexit era, and of the contemporary era more broadly, is that very small and very unrepresentative sections of society are in control of the political and moral narrative. So even as 17.4million people, the largest electoral bloc in our history, voted for Brexit, and stood by their vote for Brexit in the face of the most extraordinary campaign of demonisation that I can remember, still the Remainer elites got to write the story of Brexit.
The powers-that-be — from the business elites to more than 70 per cent of MPs to virtually the entire academy and cultural sphere — were pro-Remain. And they used their influence in the worlds of commentary, letters and culture to paint a picture of Brexit as disastrous. As toxic. As fascistic. Or, at best, as very, very difficult to enact. The disjoint between public enthusiasm for Brexit and elite disgust with it was, at times, staggering.
As a consequence, it became incredibly difficult to draw out the historic significance, the magnificence, of Brexit. Even those in public life who supported Brexit, no doubt feeling the pressure of the often deranged establishment narrative around Brexit, became defensive. Brexit was manageable, they insisted. It would be okay. “Get Brexit Done”, as the Boris Johnson campaign said in December — a tellingly apologetic slogan which, thankfully, was enough to win the support of vast numbers of Leave voters, but which implicitly played into the denigration of Brexit, the reduction of it to a difficult, pesky task. Hardly anywhere was there an assertion of the historic, epoch-defining nature of Brexit.
Well, we did it. Well, a bit of it. There’s a lot to come. Will we have the nerve to face down the EU’s trade threats? I hope so. Will we be able to withstand the inevitable disruption as we adjust to a life outside the Single Market? We’ll see. I hope we’ll be able to seize the opportunity and lead the Europe by example but who knows? maybe we’ll screw it up.
Whatever the case may be, today matters.
Comment by Patrick Crozier — February 1, 2020 @ 09:34
But, but, but … all the clever, sophisticated, highly educated people said that it was going to be an utter disaster. The trains would stop running. The power would go out. There’d be no food in the stores. The NHS would turn into a bureaucratic nightmare that would scare the pants off Kafka. There would be no tomorrow.
You mean there are still a few tattered survivors there on the post-apocalyptic shores? Who would ever have imagined such a thing?
Comment by Nicholas — February 1, 2020 @ 10:46
There will (probably) come a moment when Britain leaves the single market and trade with rEU becomes harder. Some businesses will be affected, some jobs will be lost.
But on the essential point; yes, doomsaying remainers have made fools of themselves.
Comment by Patrick Crozier — February 5, 2020 @ 07:28