Brexitese
As a militant Remainer, I felt a thrill of anticipation when my Google news app came up with “The powerful forces of the pro-EU lobby have struck a blow against Brexit.” If there were blows being struck, I wanted to hear about them, despite the subtitle “Here’s how we fight back.” Anything that had Brexiteers scared had to be good news, I thought. As it turned out, there were no momentous blows, or indeed much of substance in this article by historian Nigel Jones, but it was a good example of the language of Brexiteers, and hence their mindset. This was from The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper I respect and sometimes enjoy reading despite my opposition to its conservatism, so the article could be taken as representative of mainstream Brexiteers, half way between the rabid dogs of The Daily Mail and the left-of-centre types who voted Leave because something something bureaucracy capitalism. For this reason, as well as the pure linguistic pleasure of it, it’s worth picking apart the language.
Jones begins:
There can now be no doubt about it.
This is an example of what in the language trade we call cataphoric reference. Normally “it” is anaphoric; i.e., it refers back to something before it. “I ate a cake. It was delicious.” If you reverse it, the effect is odd. “I ate it. The cake was delicious.” That’s cataphoric reference, and that’s why we don’t normally use it. Here, though, it’s effective because it sets up a sense of anticipation, or even impending doom. Whatever “it” refers to, it’s going to be bad.
The powerful forces opposing Britain’s departure from the European Union are organised, determined, and well on their way to frustrating the clearly-expressed will of the majority of British voters to leave the corrupt, undemocratic and clearly collapsing European Union.
This next sentence contains a number of examples of Brexitese. Firstly, Brexiteers, like other populists, like to see themselves as under siege. Remember the siege of Minas Tirith? That’s how hysterical conservatives see themselves — surrounded by hordes of orcs and other foreign types, but determined to hold firm even when hope seems lost, trusting that at the last moment everything will be reversed and the forces of light will defeat the darkness.
So what is the light that will dispel the darkness? “The clearly expressed will of the majority of British voters”, that’s what. Elsewhere in the article it’s “the people’s will”, the majority having morphed into a totality. Populists like to present themselves as a majority (an oppressed one) and Brexiteers are no exception. Later the article states “About the only thing they [the media, the Establishment, “faceless corporations” etc.] do not have on their side is the majority of the British people.” As it happens, the majority of the British people were, and probably still are, in favour of staying in the EU. Every single opinion poll leading up to the referendum had a majority for remaining, which is probably why a lot of Remainers didn’t bother voting and some people voted Leave as a protest vote, thinking it could never happen. But even if a majority were in favour of Brexit, that doesn’t make it “the people’s will” because there is no such thing as the people’s will; there are only people’s wills.
“People” is an interesting word in itself. I always used to wonder why the plural of “person” could be either “people” or “persons”. It’s because “people” is actually a completely different word. “Person” is from Latin persona, originally a mask used in a play, then a role, then one’s public face, then a public figure or important person, and now, well, just a person. “People” comes from Latin populus meaning a people in the sense of nation, and specifically “the body of citizens exercising legislative power” (OED), the “P” in that SPQR on Roman standards. This is what makes it tempting to talk about “the people’s will”, as though all these different people were actually one Leviathan. To go against the will of the people is to exclude yourself from the people and be cast out. You can see why it’s a phrase beloved of totalitarians.
What, then is this triumph of the will over? The “corrupt, undemocratic and clearly collapsing European Union,” in this case. The enemy is always corrupt and degenerate, and in these days it is also undemocratic, which is ironic since in the past conservatives saw democrats as part of the horde of orcs besieging their fair citadel. But despite being so threatening, the EU is also “collapsing”. It’s a comforting trope on both the right and the left that your enemies will, left to their own devices, defeat themselves for you — all you have to do is hang in there and maybe destroy their magic ring. Capitalism will go into its terminal crisis, degenerate liberals will die out because of homosexuality and feminism, the Soviet Union fell under the weight of its own bureaucracy. (Note: only one of these examples is real.)
Metaphors about sinking ships, crumbling edifices, falling empires and so forth are common here. The danger, though, is that the sinking ship will take us down with it.
The question for the Leave majority is: what are those of us who want to escape the shackles binding us to this rotten corpse going to do about the campaign to keep us in chains?
OK, “rotten corpse” is a stronger metaphor than “sinking ship”, but it’s the same idea. And we’re bound to this rotting corpse by shackles. Ewww. If we don’t throw off our chains (a common enough metaphor) and leave the EU, we’re going to be in some zombie bondage love-fest for all eternity.
So the EU is dead, but those seeking to keep us chained to its corpse (you won’t be able to get that image out of your head for a while) are powerful elites. The paradox of populism is that it works for the rich and powerful by pretending that they are working for ordinary people, or even that they are ordinary people. This is as true of Brexit as it is for Trump, Mussolini, or a bunch of banana republics. OK, that’s an extreme case of guilt by association, so in the interests of fairness, I’ll throw in Disraeli, a nice chap who genuinely believed his brand of Conservatism would help the workers. A populist leader needs to show himself as a spokesman for the masses against the shadowy elites:
They [the elites] were stunned into silence by the realisation that ordinary people — those who felt less than thrilled to see jobs exported and the more unwelcome effects of mass migration, loss of sovereignty and cultural change — had dared to defy the universal advice of experts and their social betters to vote Leave.
This is particular ironic appearing in The Daily Telegraph, a newspaper whose main appeal is that reading it lets people think they are other people’s social betters. It is also revealing that only one of the things ordinary people are less than thrilled about is a genuine grievance — jobs moving to other countries, which has been going on since WWII and is not going to be stopped by Brexit. Anyone who thinks it’s the EU’s fault that their call centre job was outsourced to Mumbai is in the same camp as the people who voted Leave because they thought there were too many Pakistanis in the UK.
Speaking of immigrants, the bit about “mass migration” and “cultural change” is worrying, and reminiscent of Thatcher’s notorious “swamped by an alien culture” speech. But Jones makes Thatcher look positively diplomatic; elsewhere in the article he talks of “letting vast swathes of people cross open borders under the flag of ‘free movement’.” How the hell do you have swathes of people? A swathe is the area of ground a scythe can cover, or, in a completely unrelated meaning, a piece of cloth wrapped round something. You can metaphorically have swathes of territory, but not of people, unless these people are being compared to grass waiting to be scythed, which given the way these people would like to deal with immigrants may not be such a wild metaphor after all. What Jones is trying to say, I think, is “hordes”, but “hordes” sounds too Daily Mail. Again, it’s the orcs outside Minas Tirith.
Jones’ writing is so bad it’s actually quite fun to read, but the overall effect is depressing. It shows that the Telegraph version of Brexit is just the Mail version toned down a little. The same mix of anti-intellectualism, xenophobia and chauvinism is there; it’s just a little less obvious.
