Thursday, June 23rd,
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.
