How Brexit Broke Britain

The problem with Brexit isn’t simply that it’s an exceptionally bad idea, it’s that it’s left us with a national political conversation which has abandoned any expectation of integrity and honesty.

It’s a problem that has been brewing for decades, although the roots go back centuries. Since the Second World War, we have lived with a dangerous national myth that sees European nations as variously evil or weak, seeing ourselves as the bastion of light. At the same time, while the British Empire disbanded, the imperial mindset never left us, and we still see ourselves as a major global player. This rests largely on our nuclear capability, and its resultant seat on the UN Security Council, alongside the fact that English is seen as the world’s language, giving us a major advantage in cultural and soft power. We gained a major advantage from being the intersection of the Anglophone world and the stable, prosperous and largely open European Union. We do - or did - punch above our country’s weight.

The problem is that we forgot both why and how.

Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Britain and France were sent home in humiliation after a particularly egregious attempt to play at Great Powers, it has been obvious that British power has been dependent on the United States - not merely by the tacit consent of the Special Relationship, but by the fact that it is the US that makes English the world’s language, not the UK.

Now, as the US becomes suddenly and dangerously unstable and unreliable, withdrawing the mixed benefits its presence confers on us, we in turn are withdrawing from the stability and prosperity of the European Union.

It seems - at best - an odd choice. So how did we get here?

I would simply say that we failed to pay attention.

We failed to notice that the world was changing. Our nation was an early developer, in terms of military and industrial power, and the rest of the world caught up to the point where we could no longer strong-arm them into supplying our wealth and military strength at a disadvantageous ratio. We suddenly had to survive more from our own strengths and sweat. The blow was softened by our ability to ride the coat-tails of our largest colony for a while, and we managed to cling on to our myth of national exceptionalism.

We failed to notice that our historical advantages have now become our national weaknesses. Clinging to our national myth left us too used to accepting comforting fictions over uncomfortable facts. Our special status as the birthplace of the World Language left us a nation of monoglots, unwilling to travel to, interact with or learn from foreign nations we don’t understand. We swallow our national media’s fictions because we are excluded from access to viewpoints from most other nations, and tend to mistrust those few external anglophone sources which exist. We benefited for years from the excellent, well-honed negotiating skills of the polyglot EU and failed to maintain that ability at home. As a result, we find ourselves represented in EU negotiations by those who are unable, unwilling and uninterested in performing the tasks required of them. It’s telling that the reaction of the EU27 negotiators, though, is not opportunism, but frustration at the fact that negotiations are ultimately nonfunctional. To a large extent, they may as well not be happening; to a large extent, they are not happening, and we are heading for the exit deadline with no real achievement.

The behaviour and competence of our chief negotiators and leaders should itself be a matter of national outrage, but it goes almost unremarked. Our Foreign Secretary is a xenophobic buffoon. Our chief negotiator appears to have no idea how the EU operates or what the requirements of the negotiations are. And our Prime Minister seems not only to want to keep the best analyses of Brexit outcomes from the public, but, along with the rest of her Government, to have simply refused to read them herself. Clearly, she has little idea of what’s in them, but she knows it’s bad enough that releasing them would do serious harm to her unwilling and incomprehensible objectives. Each of the leading protagonists in this farce has performed acts of ineptitude or misconduct in office that should have ended their careers, but the government continues by simply ignoring them, as they ignore all inconvenient facts and evidence.

Ideally, our constitution should allow us to route around this damage, and resolve it, but here again another lingering national myth is crippling us. We pride ourselves on having the Mother of Parliaments, but our complacency has prevented us from adequately reforming it over the centuries. We have a Constitution of Convention spread over countless years and documents, understood by very few (and probably entirely understood by none), hiding its key problems. Like the US constitution, it has recently proven itself inadequate to protect the nation without persons “of good will” in key positions of power. We cling on, almost uniquely in the world, to a First Past The Post electoral system, under the myth that it gives “strong and stable” governments, forgetting that it is strong unchallenged governments which have typically done the most harm in history. In our current rather unique situation it leaves a weak but headstrong and stubborn leader searching for a coalition with thoroughly unsuitable characters from her own niche of the political spectrum, and surviving - barely - only on the sufferance of a powerful but increasingly strident and alarming faction of the media.

One more dangerous and inadequately challenged myth needs to be mentioned at this point. This is the assertion that all politicians, all media lie. Many do, but the scale between the most and least honest is immense, yet those who lie the most have normalised this behaviour to the extent that the honest and truthful are also assumed to be mendacious. Many, both in the US and UK see the truth as no longer absolute, but just one of a range of beliefs to be picked from. Faced with the clear evidence that their politicians lie, they respond with the assertion that everyone else is also lying, but their guy’s lies are better. Trump, the US’s Liar In Chief has taken this to an absolute, deeming the honest media to be Fake News while spewing constant fiction, and ultimately threatening to licence US journalists to only report “approved truth”. This might be most blatant in the US, but in the UK too the very concept of objective truth and its desirability are under attack by extremist liars and the proponents of national insanity.

Ultimately, we’ve bullshitted ourselves into a corner, and as Brandolini’s law states, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it”. We’ve clung on to national myths and illusions for so long that they now control us.

Gradually, though, we are starting to recoil from this mess. There is an inherent reluctance in humanity to admit to having been conned, to the extent that once fooled, people will continue to fool themselves with the slightest evidence, crying ever louder against facts and evidence and those who propagate them. Given this, it’s quite remarkable that the tide is starting to turn against Brexit; even the Stasi-like Thought Police declamations of the right-wing media decrying “Our Brexiteer Universities” and “treasonous remainers” may not be enough to protect the insanity of the status quo. If the holdout faction of the media turned against Brexit, it would collapse. If Labour dropped their myth of “Soft Brexit”, it would at least suffer a body blow.

We are in an era of British politics where the continuation of the existing power structure depends entirely on a failure of those in power to be held to acceptable standards of competence and behaviour, or honesty. Brexit requires, and so its backers maintain, a state of dishonesty, of abrogation of all standards, and of contempt for the truth. It has robbed us of decency, of competent government, of honest political debate, and of a stable future.

It will be a fine thing to see it fall; we only wait to see if it will happen in time to save the stability of the nation.

Making it happen

“If you’re affected by any of the issues in this essay”… there are few steps worth taking:

• Follow @InFactsOrg and @TheNewEuropean for more regular news
• Support @euromove, @a50challenge and The People’s Challenge
• Contact your MP and make your position known to them
• Support the @LibDems’ call for tighter scrutiny of Brexit and a meaningful public vote on the final deal