The Self Inflicted
Wound – Brexit and the Idea of England
A lot has been made
recently of the negativity of the Remain campaign, that it cannot
find it within itself to make a positive case for the European Union,
that, like the No campaign in the Indyref, it seems trapped in a
rhetoric of threat, that it is nothing but Project Fear 2. The
“Remain” campaign feels like a repeat performance to us in
Scotland, and it is becoming clearer by the day that Oor Wee
Referendum was regarded principally by David Cameron as “A Rehearsal
for the one that Matters.” I would argue that what looks like a
repeat is in fact a continuity – and a continuity undermined by the
very project in whose name both campaigns are undertaken. I would
argue that the valuless negativity and desperate scrabbling for a
“positive message” that characterized “Better Together” and
now defines an increasingly desperate and confused campaign to stay
in the European Community have their roots in the same paradox.
The dominant rhetoric
of the last thirty years is that “the state” is inherently
corrupt – that truth as well as virtue resides wholly in the
workings of the market. Communitarian values are the self serving
lies of state employees. Welfare corrupts its recipients, “workers
rights" are a fiction cynically put about by Trade Unionists to
feather their own nests. There are no values that cannot be measured
in money ; indeed, to attempt to do so is another Guardian reader
hypocrisy as the system of robbery known as taxation continues to
batten on the long suffering “hard working people” we hear so
much about.
And if the UK “state”
(other than the Queen and her Glorious Armed Forces) is a nexus of
this evil, what can you say about the EU? Its parasitic and
unaccountable bureaucracy getting its sticky foreign fingers into
every decent British pie, its nasty cosmopolitan pretensions to
suspiciously garlic flavoured “human rights law”, its obsessive
regulation of decently curvy British bananas and our manly disregard
for “health and safety”, let alone the protections the language
police offer to those people who lacked the better judgement to be
born with the right skin colour, gender and “sexual orientation”
whatever the hell that's supposed to mean! Oh it's enough to make ones
Boudiccan Blood Boil!
And now, after forty
years of moaning about it along with the rest of us, David Cameron
and the rest of them are trying to tell us after a couple of nights
of negotiation in some Palace somewhere that it's okay now and that
they've fixed it? Who the hell do they think they're talking to?
The deeper truth is
that the “Establishment” have inflicted on themselves with their
years of Libertarian Anti-Communitarian chit chat and assumptions, is
that when it comes to defending the Collective Values of either the
EU or the UK, their words sound hollow, unconvincing. Just as it
never seems to have occurred to these clowns that in their
systematic and self interested undermining of the welfare state and
the collective provision that they DON'T care about that they might
ALSO be undermining the collective institutions (like the EU Free Trade Area and UK plc) that they DO care about.
And the human values of inclusion, of immigrants as well as Provincials, that have been so deeply damaged by the nihilistic looting that has characterized our history since the “bad old days” of the 1970s, do seem to be threatened by the tidal wave of resentment and racial hatred that is boiling beneath the line in the comments sections of the Daily Mail.
The collateral damage
has already included the Labour Party, who did once represent, in
their always flawed way, the best hope of a unitary civilisation on these
islands. Now the Tory Party itself, like everything else in this
sceptred Isle, is beginning to look fractured and fragile as it tears itself apart between its metropolitan elite and those members of that elite who've decided that the Neanderthals are their future mandate
While the idea of
England, its richness and decency so long subsumed and distorted
beneath the Imperial and post -Imperial Fictions of Britain, might
just send the lid off the kettle...and that is going to be good for
no one on these islands that we call home.
In more senses than
simply calling these two referenda in the first place, David Cameron,
the vapid PR man , has delivered unto the Britain he professes to
love, a possibly terminal self inflicted wound.