I’ve been long wanting to write (again) about Brexit with events stumbling over each other as the dreaded date of Halloween draws near and the concomitant fear of a no-deal Brexit looms.
But I want to begin not from the hot-house atmosphere of Westminster but from the green areas of Middle England. Middle England is, of course, the British countryside that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit while London voted Remain.
Middle England is also the title of a fascinating book by Jonathan Coe that I have been reading. Built rather loosely around the lives of a middle-class family, it chronicles how this family became caught up in the Brexit controversy before the 2016 referendum.
Obviously, it does not chronicle the months after the referendum as Theresa May – and now Boris Johnson – battle unsuccessfully to see the will of the majority implemented. That could be the subject of yet another novel up to and including the disgraceful scenes in the House of Commons on Wednesday. And we still have no idea how it’s all going to end.
To understand the Brexit vote, one must go down to the shires, the Home Counties, the small villages often mentioned in the Domesday Book, built around a church and a churchyard, some shops and some straggling streets.
The book shows how – deep down – a wave of anger was being built up and stoked, anger which erupted in the Birmingham and London riots, which morphed into a huge wave of patriotism during the London Olympics but which never went away. Then, when 2008 came, and austerity ruled, living standards deteriorated as there were not enough funds to repair the infrastructure, to upgrade the hospitals and the NHS or to keep people feeling protected from crime.
The anger, in 2016, focused against migrants – not the migrants from the Commonwealth who had been there for ages, but the new migrants from post-Soviet Europe who turned out to be hard-working people who worked harder than the British.
People were helped to focus their anger at these migrants and at the EU, guilty as it was made to appear, of all the ills – the austerity, the falling standards, the fall from a perceived (and illusory) golden age of past years. People were helped to see things thus by a jingoistic press which campaigned, even to this day, in blacking the EU’s name. Boris Johnson himself, when a correspondent in Brussels, contributed more than his share of such stories.
People will always believe what they want to believe and they were led to believe that joining the EU had been a grave mistake and that the solution to all Britain’s ills was Brexit. Of course the EU is also largely to blame. The post-2008 years saw a massive insistence on austerity and fiscal discipline and many countries have skimped on infrastructural upgrading – as a result of which living standards have deteriorated across the whole continent.
The EU has defended and saved the single currency, which the UK had not joined, but it defended the banks – which maybe contributed quite substantially to the 2008 crash.
More than that, the UK seemed out of place in a continental bloc, as its history had long taught it. Speaking of integration, the UK had never been fully integrated in Europe – which was a huge pity, because English was meanwhile becoming the ‘lingua franca’ of the bloc. But, as we may fatefully see in the coming weeks, its economy – especially its manufacturing and its financial services – had become fully integrated into the EU’s sectors. The green fields and agriculture cannot feed the millions of UK citizens.
The EU is also to blame, for it has long nurtured a democratic deficit when successive upgrades were passed by a conniving government instead of being subjected to the vote of the citizens. Such are the pitfalls as the continent strives to come together.
So, in the end, the Brexiteers won but since then they have been looking around to see how Brexit could be achieved. Led by the hard-line Brexiteers in her party, Theresa May painfully cobbled a Brexit agreement which was repeatedly thrown out by a recalcitrant Parliament. Then she herself was thrown out and Boris Johnson came in.
Johnson is now pushing with all his might for an immediate election which he perceives he can win, given the sorry state of the Opposition Labour Party. In Parliament on Wednesday, first Attorney General Cox and later Johnson himself tried their best to get Labour to agree to an immediate election.
But Parliament, where Johnson has now lost his majority, would be ill-advised to give him an immediate election with no safeguards as to remove the possibility of a no-deal exit.
That left Johnson with no alternative but to huff and puff and utter the horrendous words with which he besmirched the memory of Jo Cox, the Remain Labour MP killed for her opinion days before the referendum – that the way to honour her memory is to get on with Brexit.
Such words, which have still not been apologised for, are in themselves sufficient reason why Parliament must not give Johnson what he wants so much.
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