Brexit - I Was There When Medusa Died

Thursday, June 23^rd,

The Lexington, Angel, London.

 This is the way the world ends, apparently.

There was, in fact, a bang; as Nigel Farage’s face loomed over the packed bar, the Devil Himself projected onto the wall as he retracted his concession of defeat and set about making a victory speech,  a glass soared through the air and caught him just below the right eye. I thought then and think now that the thrower’s aim was, for a drunkard, quite impressive. The glass hit the screen and dropped to the floor intact and un-shattered; a portent of the embattled UKIP leader’s career, perhaps?

There were, of course, plenty of whimpers as the night dragged on. The Lexington crowd was solidly pro-Remain, a fact of which I had to be aware for the sake of self-preservation.

Demographically, I fit the homogeneity of the Lexington lot. Ethnicity: white, British. Age: 24. Social status: middle-ish class, student, massive but ignorable debt, soon-to-be-graduate; the kind of person who was expected to vote Remain. The Lexington lot did; I did not. I was very firm in not doing it.

But Nigel Farage had taken a glass to the face, and those constituencies declaring themselves for Out were met with a torrent of curses and howls of derision. I thought it faintly ridiculous that those declaring themselves for Remain, predictable results like Islington (decidedly more in favour of the EU than Mr. Corbyn, the local MP), were met with loud whoops and cheers. As though they had ever been in doubt! These were not, I wanted to say, victories for Remain. These were not, I was tempted to point out, the places Remain needed to do well; these were not, I muttered below the jubilant cacophony, going to be enough. The pattern had emerged early on and it would not be broken by the cosmo-metropolitan vote.

But I would do no crowing of my own, for my own safety’s sake. Not until I had worked my way in; not until alcohol and defeat had made the crowd a little more pliant.

I earned my first audience by virtue of being a rare and endangered species. Always the darlings of the cameras, we pandas and polar bears; I found an eager if slightly perplexed set of listeners in the various media crews that were picking their way across a floor of dropped glasses and spilt pints.

“Have you found anyone here in favour of leave?” I asked a camera crew who turned out to be from the BBC’s Panorama program.

“No,” was the reply.

“Oh,” I said, something of a slut for this type of thing, “Well, I did.”

So it was that I gave the first of my interviews to the BBC. Others followed: French radio, a German freelancer, Danish and Dutch and Japanese TV; all seemed quite interested the reasons I voted to leave but very interested by my presence, dissent embodied, in a One-Party Pub.

I recited, three or four times, my list of grievances with the EU – its anti-democratic nature, its constitutional protection for its neoliberal and austerity-based economic policy at the expense of social protection (veering as quickly and concisely as possible between Maastricht, the SEA, the Fiscal Compact, Euro Plus, its foreign policy, its response to the migrant crisis) – and what I hoped a Brexit could accomplish.

But all, without fail, asked me what it felt like being alone amongst the Remainers. “Well,” I said, “I’m choosing my words with care. I’d rather not be lynched whilst still an EU citizen.” It was a joke. But I remembered the glass, still rolling under feet and beneath the big screen, crashing against Farage’s comically giant face. Whilst not a violent group, tolerance has its limits.

I was asked, too, for my thoughts on the nature and the character of the Leave campaign. And I remember thinking, only after the interviewers had moved on to corner one tear-stained Remainer after another, that I should have linked the two questions.

Doubtless, as I told the journalists, the Leave campaign had been characterised as one which played to peoples’ divisive nature, their prejudices and their base fears. That was all true, all of it, up to a point. But it was by no means ubiquitous. “We might,” as I made a point of saying to the BBC camera crew, “have benefitted had you taken more notice of us.” The us in that sentence is the group, sometimes called ‘Lexit’, which campaigned, for the most part, on the old Socialist case against the EU. “Slightly to the left of Tony Benn,” as I described my position to another interviewer.

What I didn’t say, and what I should have said, was that, whilst its rhetoric always affected the sentiment of unity, the truest and most real and ingrained ‘divisiveness’ was to be found in the Remain campaign.

It had been in evidence shortly before my first interview. (Or it could have been between interviews, on a brief foray upstairs.)

 “Sheep shaggers!” shouted an Irish lass as the results from one of the Welsh constituencies came in.

On referendum night, watching their own Decline and Fall, the young progressives and liberals of The Lexington had found their inner Waugh.

“From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people. It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity. Their sons and daughters rarely mate with humankind except their own blood relations.” 

Remain shared in Waugh’s high-minded disdain for the poor, the working class, the proles. It has been a feature of their campaign. But where Waugh used it for vicious (but effective) humour, it has expressed itself through Remainers as a bitter, exasperated inability to grasp the truths of the lives of others. (This is one of the things which separates Waugh from Orwell. Both writers and thinkers on the subject of class, both social conservatives by instinct, but whilst Waugh lived nothing but his heritage and position, Orwell lived Down and Out in Paris and London.)

These people, who have not felt the effects of immigration and who have not seen their jobs, their wages, their industries and their very livelihoods torn from beneath their feet by an aggressive, corporatized and corporatizing EU, have defined themselves by their lack of empathy. It’s easy to laugh at the poor, as Waugh demonstrated; it is much, much harder to be one of them. It is not to their credit that the Remain campaign didn’t even try to understand.

Now, one of the advantaged of being a smoker (and maintaining what the late Christopher Hitchens called the master-servant relationship with alcohol) is that one is privy to the best conversation. Whilst out and about in pubs or clubs, it is invariably to be had in those little concentration camps known as smoking shelters. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the smoking shelters of Britain are the Anglosphere’s equivalent of the old coffee houses of Vienna.

So it was that, as the clock ticked and the moon sank and the sun ‘found a fresher morning’ (to borrow from that other sort-of revolutionary, William Blake), I took my post-referendum analysis away from the cameras and began to put it to the gathered masses that, actually, those of us who voted to leave are not all racists and xenophobes and blaggards.

It was there that the Medusa effect of the EU, which I had long suspected but for which I was short on evidence, made itself known.

The short-form version of the theory: it was the goal of the political establishment, in its British and American and EU and faux-internationalist incarnations, to paralyse us with fear; fear of the consequences of a decision to break with received opinion and the established norm. EU protectionism was a head with many snakes: if you vote to leave, we were told, it would undermine the cause of peace. It would undermine international co-operation. It would undermine trade. It would undermine the cause of social justice. It would undermine workers’ rights. It would undermine The Economy, Stupid. It would break with a long and multifaceted and noble ambition – European integration – that would negatively affect us in every conceivable way.  It led, with the internal logic of an illogical position, to claims about WW3, about war with Russia, about the collapse of the global economy, about the rise of racism and fascism and the far-right.

Outside the Lexington, in the smokers’ zone, I was met with all of these concerns.

But I was also met by a group of people who were genuinely surprised that an alternative was possible. I give myself some credit as a communicator – I think some of it is merited, given the minds I helped change before and the minds of my fellow smokers I helped change after the referendum – that I was able to put forward the case for Lexit without meeting the same unfortunate fate as Farage’s projected head.

The first, a fairly pretty long-haired lad who was quite obviously angry with the way the night was going, seemed never to have heard anything but a right-wing case for Brexit. He, like the rest, was parroting Medusa’s lines: what about this? What about that?

But, as anyone familiar with the tale – or at least one particular version of it - will know, Medusa’s weakness was herself. It was Ovid who, having popularised the story of Narcissus (from which we get narcissism), drew on narcissism in his tale of Medusa’s downfall.

So it is that, when faced with the truth of itself in the mirror, and when its advocates are faced with the same, the EU begins to fall. Presented not with the faux-progressive’s lie, and faced instead with the true nature of the EU – its neoliberalism, its lack of concern for migrants and workers and the poor, its prioritising of banks and capital and labour over livelihoods and wages and people – its one-time advocates become freed of the spell and the EU itself becomes paralysed by the fear it created. It’s why, I suspect, the British vote will be followed by referendums in France, in Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Hungary; it’s why Project Fear will, given the right conditions, hurt its creators.

As Perseus, having won, mounted Medusa’s head on his shield, so Britain may, if it is bold, do the same.

This was born out by my experience at The Lexington, by my talks with those, once fervent and feverish Remainers, with whom I shared a common purpose and set of goals. Once bathed in the light of its true nature, the EU will – if we play it right – collapse, its constituents leant anew to an ideal but one founded, where the current vision is not, on the people, on democracy, and on a vision of the future defined not by divisiveness and inequality but by social justice and progress from which no one is left behind.

By Brexit, we have at least opened that vision as a possibility. Had we voted Remain, that door would have been locked and double-bolted. We must, of course, fight for our new future; but we can at least say that it is possible.

Hate Farage? Vote Leave.

"Vote leave and you'll get Boris, Gove and Farage," we're told. Here's why that might not happen.

I received some small amount of flak for the suggestion, made in writing elsewhere, that Donald Trump might serve an important and positive function in the progression of American Democracy.

I stand by that assertion, based as it is on a truism that I consider to be uncontroversial: anti-establishment populism, which arises from disenfranchisement and alienation from the political process, is defeated by its own success.

The Tea Party, to draw again on the American example, which spoke to and emboldened a large sect disaffected with a centrist and neo-liberalised Republican Party, earned modest (but overstated) success in the congressional and senate elections of 2010. Trump is the logical next step for Tea Party voters who saw the small fruits of their labours as evidence that so-called anti-establishmentism could be an effective, successful position.

Trump is now the black hole at the centre of their galaxy of contempt whilst the Tea Party itself has become all but irrelevant, and the senators and congressmen it supported (like Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin) are having to live down, in their campaigns for re-election, that fact that they have been in office – and of the establishment – for the past six years.

What is being portrayed almost everywhere as a new phenomenon in democratic politics is, in fact, a return to a very old one. We have had more than two decades during which Left and Right politics and governance have been absent from the thrones of power. The last new phenomenon was the seemingly ultimate victory of centrism and neoliberalism – Clinton and Blair’s Third Way – in the early ‘90s, since when the old parties of the Left (Labour in the UK and the Democrats in the US) and the Right (the Conservatives and the Republicans) have remained more loyal to The Third Way than they have to voters who, in reality and to a large but by no means total extent (many people are genuine liberals, of course), are not reliable, devoted centrists but partisans of the old ideologies.

Anti-establishment paragons and pariahs are not, then, anti-establishment so much as they are anti this establishment. What they want, whether they are of the Left or the Right, is an establishment that looks, sounds and thinks like them; one that shares their world view, which is (for all it may often sound a- or anti-political) explicitly ideological. In particular, they want to feel as though it is they who make the establishment.

The Tea Party’s success, which was to embolden a movement that has led to Trump securing the Republican nomination, has come at its own expense. It was the means; the presidency, and breaking that office from a decades-long status quo, is the goal.

On this side of the Atlantic: much has been written about support for UKIP from working class regions and communities that were once of the Labour tribe. And it is certainly true to say that UKIP, like Trump, has been and will be the beneficiary of votes from the Old Left.

But I fail to see how this continues to perplex so-called analysts and talking heads. The reason for it is very simple to understand; the Old Left is not liberal. Indeed, there used to be a healthy disdain for liberals amongst groups that considered themselves true Leftists. (The late Christopher Hitchens once described liberals as “dangerous compromisers.” Some of us maintain that view.)

The Old Left, particularly the working class Left, has not benefited from liberalism as it pertains to the interrelated issues of economics and immigration, and has been betrayed by a Parliamentary Labour Party still packed with the ghostly disciples of Blair.

Moreover, Eurosceptic and Europhobic members of both sides of the hidden divide feel betrayed, with some justification, by party élites who have sought to enshrine Third Way policies beyond the reach of sovereignty; to remove the ‘British’ prefix from domestic politics in favour of the diktats of a continental commission. This, politics under the EU, is a trickle-down philosophy that removes the people from the decision-making process; members of the demos become the subjects to whom decisions are applied rather than willing supporters offering affirmative consent at the ballot box.

The response to this disenfranchisement has been, as in America, the rise of reactionaries and populists on both sides of the hidden divide, but (again, as in America) particularly on the political Right. UKIP may take votes from Labour, but its founders, funders and most of its key members have come from the Conservative Party. Its charismatic, almost totemic leader, Nigel Farage, who trades in anti-politics and on an ‘everyman’ image, was himself a member of the Conservative Party until ’92, when he resigned his membership in protest against Maastricht and, along with other members of the Bruges Group, became a founding member of UKIP.

But the referendum ‘debate’ (though it is barely worthy of the title), as is so often the case in big political ‘moments’, has imprinted, on our collective consciousness, an impression of UKIP itself that is now wholly inaccurate: that it is a united political force.

Regardless of the result of the referendum, but especially in the event of a vote to leave the European Union, this will be exposed as one of the great lies of the campaign. The existing divisions between the leading members of UKIP are, for a party of its size, remarkable. It is only for want of space in the media narrative that they have not become fatal. Once that space opens up, I suspect they very much will be.

Nigel Farage, still the face of the party, has been sidelined over much of this referendum period by the official Vote Leave campaign, which he does not support but which his party’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, does. Farage and Carswell are enemies not only in private but also, given the time and space, in public. Another high-profile Tory defector, the appropriately named Mark Reckless (who was an MP before his defection and is not an MP anymore), was publically opposed by Nigel Farage over comments the former had made about immigration. Reckless accused Farage of arbitrarily changing party policy without consultation and without consent.

Reckless is now a Member of the National Assembly for Wales, serving under UKIP’s  Assembly leader, the unscrupulous serial litigator and generally dodgy Neil Hamilton, who is yet another high-profile UKIP figure happy to publically denounce his nominal leader. The same is true of Susanne Evans. Once Farage’s dauphine, one of UKIP’s most successful spokespeople and the author of its well-liked manifesto, Evans was purged from the party after Farage’s decision to rescind his resignation. She, along with Reckless, Carswell, Patrick O’Flynn (former Farage spin doctor and UKIP’s most prominent MEP), Godfrey Bloom and UKIP founder Alan Sked, form at least one – and probably more – faction within UKIP which is opposed to the party’s leader and barely leashed to the idea of unity by a common purpose.

Now, I have written elsewhere (and will write again) on what I consider to be the right reasons to vote in favour of leaving the EU. This does not quite number amongst them, but the idea which underpins it is not so far removed as to be entirely unrelated.

Consider what I have written already: the Conservative Party has been wedded to a centralist, neoliberal philosophy since at least the days of John Major. During that time, and in service of the EU which protects that philosophy, the party’s Eurosceptic faction (and much of its base) has been very deliberately restrained, ignored as often as possible. Consider that disenfranchisement, as I have argued, creates dissent and leads to reactionary and populist resistance. Consider that UKIP, defined by its resistance to the EU and receiver of defectors resisting the Tory mainstream, is the embodied response to that disenfranchisement.

Now consider what may happen should we vote to leave the EU. The Conservative Party will be split; gone will be the days in which centrism was its guaranteed approach. The voice of the party’s right wing will have been freed; the leader of the party, in a bid to hold it together, will have to make concessions to that faction. That faction will believe it has a chance to shape the party’s future; its voice, its arguments will be important. Freed from the certainty of centrism, those pushed to UKIP, whether they be grassroots activists or party members and perhaps even elected officials with close and recent ties to the party (O’Flynn, Carswell), would at least be tempted to return. The deep division within the party remains, and its internal squabbles (coupled with the heightened influence of its more illiberal constituents) will harm its chances in local, regional and general elections.

Farage, meanwhile, is still popular amongst those UKIP voters who have remained loyal but is deeply unpopular amongst its high-profile members. Some have left, others see him attempting to reposition the party for a post-Brexit future and mount a leadership challenge on the grounds that its future should not be defined by a man from its past.

Most of its supporters, united only in their rejection of the EU’s anti-democratic, neoliberal attitude towards economics and immigration now find that their differences are far more potent than their similarities. Many begin to drift back toward their old allegiances, whether on the Right or the Left. A decline in party membership advances the cause of those looking to oust Farage, who, in his customary fashion, refuses to go quietly. Bitter and protracted disputes, played out largely in the media, give the impression of a party utterly divided. UKIP begins to slide in the polls.

Farage may emerge victorious, but one man does not a party make and any personal success is likely to be short-lived. George Galloway and the slightly more serious Robert Kilroy Silk provide unhappy evidence that popularity, like relevance, is fleeting and fickle.

Alternatively, he might lose. Embittered, largely friendless and demonstrably angry, he might mount an ill-fated challenge as an independent candidate but the result is likely to be little different to that of the scenario in which he wins. Still, he’s a media darling; we’ll see him again in one form or another.

But the point is this: there is, as I think I have shown, at least a plausible case to say that a vote to leave the EU, far from legitimising UKIP, may be its undoing. Without a party (or at least with one bitterly divided) and shorn of the support of previously disaffected Tory and Labour voters, Farage’s personal stock might rise but his political chances will not, and the aftermath will be a gruelling period of factional disputes, infighting, and declining support.

Leaving the EU pops the centrist bubble, the mainstream parties diversify, voters return to their old ideological factions having been emboldened by the new political possibilities, and UKIP – and eventually Farage – are confined to that unpleasant period of our history under Europe.

Think about it. It’s not impossible.