Heroic Failure: history, humiliation and Brexit

Above is a talk by Irish journalist and author Fintan O’Toole regarding his much-touted book on Brexit – and the social and cultural impetus behind it – Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain.

O’Toole’s rather fanciful and ultimately unconvincing explanation for Brexit involves depicting the English, for it is the English and their neuroses and not that of the Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish that informed the desire to exit the European Union, as a people in the grip of a crushing self-pity, which filtered through the myths of the British empire and the Second World War resulted in a paradoxical mix of a sense of superiority and a feeling that Britain was being traduced.

What the Spanish, French and Germans failed to achieve through hundreds of years of conflict – i.e. the capitulation of British/English independence – the continentals were attempting to achieve through the European Union.

But it is not only a reading of English/British military and diplomatic history – in which Britain/England sees the continental powers not as partners but as long-terms adversaries if not enemies – that O’Toole says illuminates Brexit ideology; it is also the peculiar self-flagellating culture of the English, in which failure, suffering and humiliation is regularly valorised, presented as virtuous and demonstrative of higher character.

Thus, O’Toole points to John Moore’s retreat from Corunna during the Napoleonic Wars, the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, Scott’s disastrous Antarctic expedition, Gallipoli and especially Dunkirk as examples of how the English/British revel in disaster and failure.

Even Britain’s greatest triumphs, O’Toole argues – the building of a mammoth, global empire and the defeat of Nazi tyranny – ended up in the English psyche as defeats, with the English portraying themselves as more oppressed than oppressor, as more loser than winner as the empire disintegrated unjustly, betrayed by ungrateful subjects, and the post-second world war settlement resulted in former enemies such as Germany, Italy, Japan – and even those Britain helped save, France, Benelux – overtaking the victor economically and leaving it with an overwhelming sense of grievance.

To illustrate this curious simultaneous English will to power with an attraction to victimhood, O’Toole draws on popular literature and television in the years leading up to Brexit, including Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, and, more bizarrely, E.L. James’ wildly popular sado-masochistic fantasy Fifty Shades of Grey.

The reference to the latter is surely tongue-in-cheek, as must be O’Toole’s suggestion that those who voted Brexit – the over 50s – would’ve grown up as punks in the 1970s and that they carried over the spirit of rip it up and anarchy into the Brexit vote. To prove this unlikely point, O’Toole cites John Lydon’s support for Brexit, Arron Banks’ tactics of outrage, mockery and mischief, and Boris Johnson’s use of the Clash’s London Calling as his signature tune for his London mayoral campaign and the future prime minister’s choice on Desert Island Discs of the same group’s Pressure Drop – a cover of Toots and the Maytals’ ska classic – as one of the songs he’d like to accompany him in his enforced solitude.

O’Toole devotes a great deal of his argument to suggesting that it was German reunification in 1990 that galvanised the campaign to leave the EU, reviving a phobia among the English of a hegemonic Germany in Europe and resentment that this power would emerge despite all the sacrifices the British – in blood, treasure and empire – had previously expended to forestall precisely this.

O’Toole exaggerates British Germanophobia. No doubt, it existed among those – like Margaret Thatcher – who remembered and lived through the Second World War; but it wasn’t fear of British subordination to Germany that swayed many to commit to Brexit but a specific dislike of the way Chancellor Angela Merkel 25 years after German unity declined to give David Cameron the fig leaf he needed to say to the conservative right that he had extracted significant concessions from the EU in his supposed renegotiation of the terms by which Britain could stay in the bloc.

Merkel’s short-sightedness and carelessness was compounded by her government’s catastrophic and cynical decision in 2015 to open Germany’s borders to migrants and refugees fleeing wars in the Middle East and economic malaise in Asia and Africa.

It was this influx of non-EU immigrants that spooked the British. Reeling from a decade of Islamist attacks including the 7/7 attacks on London transport in 2005, the savage murder of Lee Rigby in 2013, the recruitment to ISIS of young British Muslims, who proceeded to carry out barbaric killings of Westerners in Syria and Iraq, including Britons, which conflated EU Freedom of Movement with more migrants from Muslim countries to Britain.

The Brexit campaign specifically drew attention to this fear by stressing how Turkey – a country of 80m Muslims – was bound to join the EU (and benefit from Freedom of Movement) – and depicting a flood of Muslim refugees and immigrants making their way through Europe at the invitation of Angela Merkel with the inevitable end point being the UK.

In the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum, Tony Blair put it like this: ‘For many people, the core of the immigration question – and one which I fully accept is a substantial issue – is immigration from non-European countries especially when from different cultures in which assimilation and potential security threats can be an issue.’

Amid all the exaggerated and inappropriate metaphors, O’Toole does get at some truths about Brexit. He’s on strong ground when he suggests that Brexiteers did not expect to win and had no plan for the day after if they did.

Brexit, O’Toole says, ‘was always intended to fail. When… in his call to tell David Cameron that he was going to campaign for Leave, Boris Johnson assured the then prime minister that ‘he doesn’t expect to win, believing Brexit will be “crushed”, he was for once telling the truth. For a critical section of its supporters, and in particular for the effective leader of the Leave campaign, Brexit was always meant to be a Lost Cause. It would have been a jolly fine show, a splendid performance against insuperable odds. It would have the romance of, say, another great secession, the Confederacy in the southern states of the US: a thoroughly bad cause given a veneer of nobility by honourable defeat.’

Indeed, O’Toole argues, the vacuousness of the Brexit project, its ‘intellectual indolence’ and ‘the patrician languor’ it represents, its complete inability to address any of the issues of powerlessness and decline that prompted the Brexit revolt in the first place, will inevitably lead to an even more dangerous and damaging narrative centred around who betrayed Brexit, who stopped it from achieving its aims of ‘taking back control’ and initiating the promised English nationalist idyll.

O’Toole pessimistically opines that : ‘The self-pity of Lost Causism will meld with the rage of betrayal. Without the EU as whipping boy and scapegoat, there will be no end of blame and no shortage of candidates to be saddled with it: anyone and everyone except the Brexiteers themselves. That most virulent of poisons, the ‘stab-in-the-back’, is in the bloodstream now and it will work its harm for a long time.’