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.

Germany: Europe's Alpha & Omega, Beginning & End.

Germany: Europe’s Alpha and Omega, Beginning and End.

Sunday, March 13^th – Chancellor Angela Merkel faces three regional elections in the German states of Saxony-Anhalt, Baden-Weurttemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate that are being described, by various observers, commentators and news outlets, as a ‘test of support’ for the Chancellor’s stance on the refugee crisis.

‘Test’ is one way to describe the process, I suppose. Whilst frau Merkel might wish it to be otherwise, the sudden rise of the anti-establishment and populist AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), which is presenting its regional campaigns as a national referendum on Germany’s open-door response to the crisis and which is polling well above the 7.1% of the vote it achieved in the European elections of 2014, is pulling the narrative away from regional affairs and on to questions of national policy.

International policy, as well. AfD, which is the political wing of the Pegida movement in all but name, is but the closest to home of the myriad of anti-immigration, anti-EU parties that are now in bloom across Europe, resplendant in colours of both the Left and the Right. Syriza and Golden Dawn in Greece, the Jobbiks in Hungary, the FPO and the Freedom Party of Austria, National Front in France, UKIP and roughly half the Tory cabinet at home – the political allegiances, goals and methods of each may differ drastically; what they all seem to have in common, and what those that tend toward anti-immigration sentiments certainly have in common, is their opposition to Angela Merkel and the policies of the CDU-led coalition government in Germany.

Angela Merkel is the public face of Germany’s official response to the migrant (or refugee) crisis. Given the unity of the opposition to that response across the right and the far-right, anti-Merkelism seems a fitting and necessary addition to their labels.

There is an essential qualifier to what I am about to say and I beg that you withhold your judgement until you have seen it: they are right to be opposed to Merkel and the German response.

This is not to say that any position defined by xenophobia is correct. This is not to give credence to any argument that is by its nature anti-migrant. But it is to acknowledge that migration policy should be open to discussion (and the argument that the encouraging of mass-immigration is itself an anti-migrant position), and it is to acknowledge that the imposition of policy without an elected mandate, nationally or Europe-wide, is anti-democratic. They are right, then, in that this issue sheds light on the cracks in the foundations of the European Union; cracks that are becoming fissures as the weight of Germany’s influence continues to grow.

You might, as I do, feel by instinct that we should help the poor and the desperate and the destitute. You might, as I do, feel a profound anger at an international community that has shown itself to be powerless to stop the savagery and the barbarism of the conflict in Syria, to which we have contributed bombs and planes and very little else. You might feel, as I do, that the promise by our own government to take in 20,000 refugees over five years is at best a negligible one.

We would, then, share the conviction that these refugees deserve far better than their lot.

But to take that conviction and hide behind it, to throw in the faces of those opposed to mass-migration the accusation that they are unfeeling and uncaring, is to be uncritical. To praise Chancellor Merkel’s decision to open Germany’s borders is to give her credit that she does not deserve, based on the presumption that it is something that it’s not.

That decision, which I suspect was intended solely (or mostly) to win popular support for the CDU in Germany, represents the impossibility of unilateral action in the context of a continental political union. What it amounted to was the creation of a policy in Germany, for German party-political interests, which has now been imposed upon every other member state in the European Union, especially those in what has become known as the Balkans Route, without any form of democratic debate, without their consent, and without any consideration for their ability to deal with its consequences.

It shows the arrogance of a continental power, on whose industry and economy the European Union has been built, deeming either that its own interests trump all other concerns or that what is in its own interests must, by definiton, be in everyone else’s interests, too.

This arrogant assumption of power is, in fact, no assumption at all. Power in both the Eurozone and the European Union has never been properly codified to rest in any one elected body; it has its own freedom of movement and, like money, like people, it is drawn to the one place power is known to coalesce of its own volition: power itself. Germany, by virtue of the strength of its economy, is the power in Europe. As such, it has become not only the economic hub but also the political centre of the continent. Dealings between EU member states, and between the EU and other nations, happen through Germany with the official apparatus serving as nothing but a seldom-used fig-leaf.

Greece, which harbours the firsts ports to which migrants and refugees arrive from Turkey on their way to Germany, provided just one of a series of examples of Germany’s monopoly on power. When Syriza swept to electoral victory on the promise of rejecting and then reversing the economic doctrine imposed upon them by the Troika, it was Germany which led the counterrevolution. It demanded control of the Greek economy. When it failed, it demanded the imposition of its own austerity doctrine on the Greek state, effectively using different words to make the same demand.

The charismatic Yanis Varoufakis, during his brief stint as Syriza’s finance minister, primarily dealt not with members of the Eurogroup (comprised of the finance ministers of those countries within the Eurozone) but with Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister and architect of the ‘deals‘ imposed upon Greece that Syriza had been committed to reversing. When Varoufakis attempted to discuss the changes proposed by Syriza, he was met with a steadfast refusal to compromise. Shauble’s view was, according to Varoufakis, that “‘I’m not discussing the programme – this was accepted by the previous [Greek] government and we can’t possibly allow an election to change anything.”

Varoufakis was subsequently removed from the negotiating team, resigning from his post in the Syriza government shortly afterwards, and Schauble got his way.

Greece now has unemployment standing at 25% and it remains to be seen whether it will be able even to service the debt on the last round of bailout funds. Its economic policy, created in and imposed by Germany, leaves it in an untenable position. And now it is expected to shoulder the burden of Germany’s immigration policy, even as that same policy has led to countries along the Balkans route invalidating the Schengen agreement by unilaterally closing their borders. That move has been condemned by frau Merkel, but yet again it is a display of arrogance. Germany is allowed to unilaterally set the immigration policy of the European Union (and beyond – Macedonia has been a candidate for accession since 2005, is not yet a full member, but is amongst those with new fences along its borders) but others, like Hungary, are not allowed to do the same.

Germany is, meanwhile, leading the team negotiating with Turkey on the issue of migration. The vast majority of boats arriving on the borders of the now-dead Schengen zone leave port in Turkey for an often treacherous journey across the Aegean. Given the nature of the Erdogan government, it would be very difficult to imagine the Turkish negotiating team doing anything other than exploiting the migration crisis to suit their own ends: visa-free travel for Turkish citizens within the EU in advance of fasttracked admission to the Union proper. And, given the nature of the Erdogan government, it is tempting to ask quite how committed Turkey is to stopping the boats given that each one serves their political purposes quite nicely.

Any deal struck between Germany and Turkey with provisions for faster Turkish integration with the EU will be yet another example of EU policy set and pursued by Germany without even the pretense at democratic negotiation with its supposed equals.

This is the state of things as they are and there is no hint of any improvement to come. The migration crisis, the nature of which warrants an article of its own, is playing into a crisis in Europe; a political union in which the only demos with any power are the German people. It is they alone whose votes, under the current system, have any real influence on European policy. We have our own referendum to focus on, but should we vote to stay, there will be another referendum soon afterwards; a referendum on the nature of the European Union under the guise of a German general election.

The domestic debate in Germany, a debate of domestic policy, is then not domestic at all. Pegida and the AfD, along with parties like the Greens, represent a continent’s worth of dissatisfaction with a deaf establishment. And it is a damning indictment of the structure of the European Union, a provocateur of the extremes to which the disenfranchised will become suseptible, as well as the complete and final proof of its lack of anything even resembling a democratic process, that burden of responsibility now rests almost entirely on the shoulders of German voters.

You may interpret it as you like when I say that it is a burden we should do our part to alleviate them of.