An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea
–TURKISH PROVERB
Of all the pleasurable emotions, self-pity is the one that most makes us want to be on our own. Since no one else can fully share it, it is best savoured in solitude. Only alone can we surrender completely to it and immerse ourselves in the steaming bath of hurt, outrage and tender regard for our terribly wronged selves. Brexit therefore makes sense for a nation that feels sorry for itself. The mystery, though, is how Britain, or more precisely England, came not just to experience this delightful sentiment but to define itself through it.
We tend to think of self-pity as being similar to low self-esteem, but it is in fact a form of self-regard. The great early nineteenth-century English radical Leigh Hunt, in his commentary on John Keats, picks up on the phrase ‘flattered to tears’ in the poem ‘Music’: ‘In this word “flattered” is the whole theory of the secret of tears; which are the tributes, more or less worthy, of self-pity to self-love. Whenever we shed tears, we take pity on ourselves; and we feel, if we do not consciously say so, that we deserve to have the pity taken.’1
The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves when we do not get what we know we deserve. Herbert Spencer in The Principles of Psychology puzzled over the emotion he variously called ‘pleasurably-painful sentiment’, ‘the luxury of grief’, and ‘self-pity’:
It seems possible that this sentiment, which makes a sufferer wish to be alone with his grief, and makes him resist all distraction from it, may arise from dwelling on the contrast between his own worth as he estimates it and the treatment he has received… If he feels he has deserved much while he has received little, and still more if instead of good there has come evil, the consciousness of this evil is qualified by the consciousness of worth, made pleasurably dominant by the contrast. One who contemplates his own affliction as undeserved necessarily contemplates his own merit… there is an idea of much withheld and a feeling of implied superiority to those who withhold it.2
Self-pity thus combines two things that may seem incompatible: a deep sense of grievance and a high sense of superiority. It is this doubleness that makes it so important to the understanding of Brexit, a political phenomenon that is driven by ideas that would not otherwise combine. Crudely, passionate nationalism has taken two antagonistic forms. There is an imperial nationalism and an anti-imperial nationalism; one sets out to dominate the world, the other to throw off such dominance. The incoherence of the new English nationalism that lies behind Brexit is that it wants to be both simultaneously. On the one hand, Brexit is fuelled by fantasies of ‘Empire 2.0’, a reconstructed global mercantilist trading empire in which the old white colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs to imagine that it is a revolt against intolerable oppression. It therefore requires both a sense of superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can bring them together.
Not for nothing did the most brilliant and popular comic character of the post-war period in England, Tony Hancock, repeatedly play out three-part episodes in which his delusions of grandeur led to painful disappointment and luxurious self-pity. In 1971, around the time of the publication of the British government’s White Paper proposing entry into what was then the Common Market, the English writer Colin Wilson wrote:
Over the past twenty-five years, the English have built up a national grudge – perhaps due to disappointed expectations after winning the War – and now it is so firmly established that the country resembles one of those Strindbergian households where everybody nags and tries to make everybody else miserable. On the other hand, the Germans at the end of the War had the same advantage as Britain at the beginning – of facing a crisis situation that left no room for resentment or petulance. The result was the German economic recovery. Meanwhile, like spoilt children, the English sit around scowling and quarrelling, and hoping for better times.3
This is, of course, greatly exaggerated and overly generalized. But it has a grain of truth. Britain was entitled to a national grudge. As Arnold Toynbee reflected in 1962, ‘The consciousness of having once been heroes can be as great a handicap as the consciousness of having once failed to rise to the occasion.’4 Britain had, after all, been on the winning side in the continent’s two great twentieth-century wars. And if the mythology of the ‘finest hour’ and of ‘standing alone’ in the early part of the Second World War was overdone, there had indeed been extraordinary resolve, ingenuity and heroism in 1940 during the Battle of Britain and afterwards in North Africa, Italy and northern Europe. It was by no means ridiculous to feel that Britain, in Spencer’s terms, had deserved much but received little. It had lost its empire, become virtually bankrupt, suffered economic stagnation and, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 (just over a decade after the great triumph), had its pretensions as a world power brutally exposed. To make matters much worse, the former Axis powers of Japan, Germany and Italy were booming, as were France and the Benelux countries, all of whom had been rescued from the Nazis in part by the British. Who could avoid a sense of disappointed expectations?
We must acknowledge, too, the sheer exhilaration of being English for a young, white, privileged man during and after the war. In 1962, when Britain was making its first abortive bid to join the Common Market, the journalist and historian of the British Empire James (later Jan) Morris recalled the euphoria of those years. When he turned nineteen, he was given a commission in a “superb” cavalry regiment in ‘one of the most triumphant armies of British history.’ His comrades were ‘men of remarkable character, cultivation, and assurance’ in a division that had fought its way triumphantly across North Africa and up through Italy: ‘Our enemies were humbled, our allies seemed dullards beside us, and it never occurred to me to doubt that this intensely English organism, this amalgam of bravado and tradition . . . was the very best thing of its kind that any country in the world could offer.’5
When the six countries of the Coal and Steel Community met at Messina on 7 November 1955 – a meeting that would lead to the signing of the Treaty of Rome and the foundation of what would become the European Union – Britain was invited to join them. It sent a minor official, Russell Bretherton, under-secretary of the Board of Trade. He sat in cold silence through the meeting, then rose and delivered his verdict:
The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed it has no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.6
It is easy, in retrospect, to mock this blinkered arrogance, but it has a certain magnificence. It preserves the swagger of victory – a victory, moreover, that was one, not of mere imperial conquest, but of human salvation. And yet, within a very few years, it evaporated. England’s slow homecoming from the war was as if Odysseus had come back to Ithaca at last, only to find that Penelope had married one of her suitors and to hear news from afar that Troy had rebuilt itself from the ashes and was doing rather well. It is surely one of the great dis appointments of world history. Of the other three major Allied countries that had won the war, the USA and Russia were hegemonic global powers and France was energized by its first thorough-going industrial revolution. Only Britain had to cope with the moral deflation of anti-climax.
During the war, one of the leading English intellectuals, Cyril Connolly, could write almost matter-of-factly of the post-war order that ‘It will be a world in which the part played by the English will be of supreme importance… England will find itself in the position of one of those fairy-tale princes who drift into a tournament, defeat a dragon or wicked knight, and then are obliged to marry the king’s daughter and take on the cares of a confused, impoverished, and reactionary kingdom. That kingdom is Europe…’7 The implicit concern was that England would be marrying beneath it – that its advances might be rejected was unimaginable.
The fairy-tale English Kingdom of Europe did not come into being. James Morris gave voice to a heartfelt lament. Contrasting the psychological state of the nation in 1962, when its first effort to join the Common Market was about to be rebuffed, with that in the war years, he wrote that in just fifteen years, the ‘feeling of happy supremacy’ he had felt as a young cavalryman had vanished.
So complex is the transition through which our people are presently passing, that frank pride of country has all but gone by the board, and patriotism is very nearly a dirty word. Only fifteen years, and today the intelligent young Englishman all too often seems trap ped in a drab web of inferiority.
When collective moods swing so radically from pole to pole, it is a safe bet that what is happening is not a transition from one to the other but a constant hovering between them. Between psychological extremities, to adapt W. B. Yeats, England must run its course. The ‘feeling of happy supremacy’ co-exists with the sense of being trapped in a ‘drab web of inferiority’. The power of Brexit is that it promised to end at last all this tantalizing uncertainty by fusing these contradictory moods into a single emotion – the pleasurable self-pity in which one can feel at once horribly hard done by and exceptionally grand. Its promise is, at heart, a liberation, not from Europe, but from the torment of an eternally unresolved conflict between superiority and inferiority.
It is striking, looking back on English intellectual opinion about the merits or demerits of joining the Common Market as expressed in the leading monthly journal of liberal intellectual debate, Encounter, to find these extremes of self-aggrandizement and self-abasement. On the one hand, there is the hubris. Morris, in his reflections on the great change of mood, could still console himself with the obvious truth that England was morally and culturally superior: ‘More than most Powers, we can still presume to precedence in teaching nations how to live’.8 Even in making the argument in 1971 that Britain should stay out of Europe and forget all its pretensions to be a world power, Joan Robinson, professor of economics at the University of Cambridge, appealed to a notion of innate moral superiority that could be nurtured in splendid isolation: ‘I think that, as empires go, the British Empire was not discreditable and that to give it up (in the main) without a fight was a very unusual example of common sense. Let us now have enough sense to accept the position of a small country and try to show the world how to preserve some elements of civilisation and decency that the large ones are rapidly stamping out.’9
Nancy Mitford, contemplating the prospect of Britain helping to build a new European empire asked (half-facetiously) ‘What about Prince Charles as Emperor? The name is auspicious and the person very suitable.’10 (The frustration of being still only poor Prince Charles almost fifty years after this was written must be deepened by the knowledge that he could have been Charlemagne.) The great violinist Yehudi Menuhin suggested (not at all facetiously) that Britain’s ruling class, now that it was no longer running half the world, should offer itself for hire to lesser polities: ‘I must confess to a bias. I have often thought, now that the days of Empire are changed, that Britain… with her great administrative experience and remarkable achievement in the Civil Service should offer a world-wide service called “Rent-a-Government” which would take its place among the enormous combines which build dams or cities, or provide insurance or advice on investment.’ The White Man’s Burden, stoically assumed in the imperial propaganda of F. D. Lugard and Rudyard Kipling, could now be turned into a nice little earner.
Menuhin also suggested that the hard-working Germans might wish to subsidize the leisure of the English. He wondered ‘whether… German citizens will underwrite the perhaps less efficient British industries and their workers. Actually, the latter is not a bad idea, for it would enable the British worker to be the “test pilot” to explore on behalf of all mankind the use of leisure by the industrial populations at large.’11
(Such fantasies were not entirely confined to artists and intellectuals. At the start of the 1970s, a Gallup poll had suggested that 43 per cent of Britons expected that because of the wonders of new technology they would only have to work three days a week.12 When the three-day week did arrive in December 1973 it was, alas, in rather grimmer circumstances.)
Less obviously ludicrous but no more fantastical was a notion that would return in full force with Brexit: that British superiority could be reborn in a new union, not with Europe, but with the old English-speaking and mainly white Empire. The historian Robert Conquest imagined in 1971 that this alternative superstate would keep the Europeans from going too far wrong:
The direction in which Britain should seek closer ties is within its own tradition of language, law, and politics; that is, with the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the Caribbean Commonwealth countries… now that the United States has virtually admitted its inability to cope more or less alone with world problems, it too has a motive for a larger union of this sort. I would also argue that a United Europe without us would be stronger and safer under the protection of a much larger and more powerful ‘Anglo-Saxon’ union than if further increased in size and power itself, and so more liable to… dangerous delusions.13
This particular fantasy would return in Brexit: the idea that leaving the EU would allow Britain to take its more natural place in the reconstituted white empire of the ‘Anglosphere’. One solution to the idea of being simultaneously small and great, underdog and overdog, has been, in Linda Colley’s words, ‘a persistent inclination to pursue empire vicariously by clambering like a mouse on the American eagle’s head’.14
Even in the more realistic White Paper on entry to the Common Market, published in July 1971, a certain self-importance was taken for granted: ‘The entry of the United Kingdom into the European Communities is… an issue of historic importance, not only for us, but Europe and the world.’15 And, at a more demotic level, the idea of surrendering to necessity could be fused with a vivid self-regard – we may be having to join the continentals after all but by God they’re lucky to have us. The very popular Daily Express columnist Jean Rook marked the moment of entry to the Common Market on New Year’s Day 1973: ‘Since Boadicea, we British have slammed our seas in the faces of invading frogs and wops, who start at Calais. Today, we’re slipping our bolts. And, of all that we have to offer Europe, what finer than contact with our short-tongued, stiff-necked, straight-backed, brave, bloody-minded and absolutely beautiful selves? To know the British (it takes about 15 years to get on nodding terms) will be Europe’s privilege.’16
Delusions, of themselves, are not necessarily neurotic. The trouble comes when you keep shifting between two opposing frames of mind. For side by side with this grandiosity there was a sense of abjection. A common theme in the early 1970s is that Britain is such a failure that it has no choice but to join the Europeans. The image is not that of a fabulous dynastic union but, rather, of a grumpy old bachelor settling for a bad marriage because the alternative is a slow death in miserable loneliness. The military historian Michael Howard writes in 1971, ‘Nor is it clear that Western Europe will be made any richer, or happier, or more powerful if we do join. But the probability remains strong, that we will be poorer, more miserable and even more impotent than we are at present if we do not. The issue is no longer one that excites me very much.’17 Donald Tyerman, former editor of The Economist, went so far as to suggest that Britain might not even be worthy of Common Market membership: ‘As an observer, the biggest change since 1962–63 seems to me to be that, whereas then the sticking question was whether Europe was fit for us to join, the question now is, at bottom, whether we are fit to join Europe. If we go into that kitchen, can we stand the heat?’18
Joining was framed for the British, not as an act of collective will, but as a collective surrender of will. As the architect Sir Hugh Casson put it, using the advice rapists give to their victims: ‘it’s bound to happen anyway, so why not lie back and enjoy it?’19 The sense is not so much that Britain wants to go into the Common Market, but that, in Marghanita Laski’s plaintive question: ‘Where else can we go?’20 Britain had been evicted from its imperial palace and must either take the council’s offer of a dull suburban house or become homeless in the world. As the 1971 White Paper put it: ‘In a single generation we should have renounced an imperial past and rejected a European future. Our friends everywhere would be dismayed. They would rightly be as uncertain as ourselves about our future role and place in the world… Our power to influence the Communities would steadily diminish, while the Communities’ power to affect our future would as steadily increase.’21
But there was between these co-existing alternatives of airy haughtiness and dejected resignation, a third possibility: fecklessness. It is shocking in retrospect to consider how many leading English intellectuals, caught between the conviction of superiority and the feeling of impotence, simply opted out. One of the modes of the privileged classes in England is a studied ennui, a pose of perfect indifference. In Encounter’s symposiums on whether or not to join Europe in 1962 and 1971, there is a significant strain of lazy world-weariness. Casson tartly expressed his ‘disregard for those intellectuals who… either, protested, often at some length, their inability to understand the implications – what are intellectuals for? – or who, from the shelter of a comfortably cushioned chair, said the matter was of little interest since for them life will go on just as before’.
He was not wrong. Perhaps the best-known English historian of the time was the original ‘TV don’ A. J. P. Taylor, a conscious ‘Little Englander’. Here he is on the Common Market: ‘There is no British opinion about “going into Europe” intellectual or otherwise. No one understands it. No one cares about it, for or against, except perhaps for a few politicians who have taken up the affair as a means of professional advancement. Maybe it is the most decisive moment in British history since the Norman conquest or the loss of America. No one takes any notice all the same… Entry into Europe is the greatest non-question of all time.’22 This was not in fact true of the general public: when, a month after Taylor wrote this, the government’s White Paper on entry went on sale, there were queues outside the bookshops. It sold over a million copies, making it the best-selling official document in British history. During that month of July 1971, 100,000 people a week paid their 25 pence for a copy.
The boredom was, rather, a projection of intellectual irresponsibility that amounted to a treason of the clerks. John Sparrow, Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, and author, ironically, of Controversial Essays, was not untypical: ‘Flattered as I am to be asked to contribute to your symposium about “Going into Europe”, I am afraid I cannot supply you with a useful answer. This is a topic about which I am both ignorant and undecided. I don’t know which side I ought to be on and I don’t even know which side I am on.’ The novelist John Braine wrote, ‘If I were an editor, nothing would induce me to publish even one short article about the Common Market, let alone a symposium. The subject bores me stiff.’23 Kenneth Clarke, who interpreted civilization for the masses in his Olympian TV programmes, replied to Encounter’s invitation with a terse dismissal: ‘Like E. M. Forster, “I cannot make out”, so am not qualified to make any statement at all. (Instincts all against.)’24
So, besides grandiosity and gloom, there was always intellectual indolence. It is important to keep this in mind because it is a strain in English public discourse about Europe that would never go away. It was in part a tic of the class system: it doesn’t do for a fellow to seem to care very much about anything. In the early period of Britain’s engagement with the European project, it took the form of an exaggerated boredom. But it was easy to convert affected boredom into mock-hysteria, easy to turn patrician languor into a sense that the whole thing is a jolly game. Each is a way of saying that none of it really matters, and of brushing off any real responsibility for the consequences. The form of irresponsibility would change, but the fundamental attitude would remain, especially among the occupants of comfortably cushioned chairs for whom ‘life will go on just as before’ whether or not Britain is in the EU. The droll affectation would prove to be a deadly affliction.
At the point of entry in 1973, however, the two mainingredients of pleasurable self-pity – a sense of one’s own superiority and a feeling that one is unjustly beaten down – still existed separately. They had not yet been combined in the toxic cocktail that the Brexiteers would convince a majority of their compatriots to swallow in 2016. For that to happen, three conditions would have to be fulfilled. The first was a renewed sense of disappointment; the second a shift in the nature of the British scapegoat; the third the undermining of the great British compensation for its loss of global prestige.
Given the rather tepid ‘where else would we go?’ argument in favour of joining the Common Market, it is not surprising that it was never a popular cause. As late as April 1970, polls showed that a mere 19 per cent favoured entry, while 57 per cent thought Britain’s application should be dropped altogether even before the talks on it were due to begin in June. Nor was there anything like a political consensus. Labour was largely sceptical and the thirty-seven Tory MPs who voted against entry in October 1971 made up the largest backbench Conservative rebellion since the vote of no confidence in Neville Chamberlain in 1940. Membership of the Common Market was therefore sold – and grudgingly accepted – primarily as a sovereign remedy for Britain’s economic ills.
But the expectation that entry would allow Britain to transcend the disappointed expectations of the post-war years was itself disappointed. First impressions last – it matters that the decade after the UK joined was in fact ‘the most dreadful of the postwar era, a litany of racial conflict in England, nationalist discontent in Scotland and Wales, war in Ireland and perpetual strikes everywhere’.25 Instead of the turbo-charged lift-off into the future, the British Seventies were, according to Francis Wheen: ‘one long Sunday evening, heavy with gloom and torpor’26 though it was surely a particularly manic kind of torpor.
The years in which Britain decided to join and then settled into membership of the Common Market were notably panicky. As Wheen has pointed out, ‘In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970… a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five.’27 Thus, on either side of the momentous decision to join the European project, Britain was in crisis mode. These five national emergencies may have planted the seeds of one of the tropes that would surface in the coming decades and flower in Brexit: the idea that Britain was, in some way, still at war.
This great disappointment led on to the second condition: the question of who is to blame? And here, there was a gradual and deeply ironic change. England in the 1960s and 1970s was flagrantly racist. There was a ready and visible target for those looking for someone to blame for the country’s economic and social ills – black people, who had themselves replaced Jews in the role. (It is not coincidental that the last English anti-Semitic riots took place in 1947, just ten months before the arrival of the Empire Windrush carrying the first wave of post-war immigrants from the Caribbean.) Racism most certainly did not disappear in the 1980s and 1990s, but its open expression did become much more unacceptable in politics, public discourse and popular culture. After Enoch Powell destroyed his mainstream political career with the inflammatory racism of his ‘rivers of blood’ speech in April 1968, no senior figure with credible designs on power would again so explicitly blame blacks and Asians for England’s failings. The dog whistle would replace the megaphone.
This left a vacancy, which was filled by the European Union. A particular irony is that the scapegoating of the EU as the eternal source of England’s ills was facilitated in part by one of the more progressive developments in British culture: the gradual marginalization of open racism. ‘Brussels,’ as Richard Weight puts it, ‘replaced Brixton as the whipping boy of British nationalists.’28 That the EU did indeed partly occupy the space where open racism had once flourished is evident in the large overlap between pro-Brexit and anti-immigrant sentiment. But this suggests that much of the animosity was never really about the EU itself – it was a sublimated or displaced rage at Them. The black and brown Other fused with the European Other.
The third condition for the emergence of a politically potent self-pity was negative. In 1962, Arnold Toynbee made a crucial point about the ways in which the English had historically avoided occasions for self-pity:
In the past the English have avoided the awful mistake of crying over spilt milk. They have quickly found and milked new cows, instead of standing still and wringing their hands. … In our day we have had recourse to this simple but effective British philosophy once again in meeting our own generation’s ordeal. Recognising, as we did in good time, that the days of colonial rule were numbered, we decided to make the liquidation of our 19th-century Empire into a festival instead of a funeral. … Simultaneously we found another new world to win within the coasts of our own island. In our generation we have won not only the Commonwealth but the Welfare State… The Welfare State and the Commonwealth are obviously two of those exhilarating enterprises that are England’s traditional prescription for easing the painfulness of change.29
Toynbee’s point about the Commonwealth is probably, in the long term, wrong – it may have eased the pain of withdrawing from Empire but it has never been an English exhilaration. Yet the idea of the welfare state as a dike against the floods of tears over spilt milk is crucial. The building of the welfare state was a tangible rebuke to temptations to wallow either in empty fantasies of supremacy or in the masochistic delights of impotence. For the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom (and for my Irish relatives who emigrated partly to join that new social order) it represented stunning progress. The creation of an institution like the National Health Service was a novel kind of conquest, a turning of British energy inwards to face the great enemies of squalor and disease. It was indeed a new world that was won, and one that made more positive difference to British lives than the grabbing of colonies had ever done.
Conversely, the gradual erosion of the welfare state after the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 was, among other things, an undermining of the seawalls that kept those oceans of self-pity at bay. A welfare state is about the future – it gives young people a sense that they have one and older people the confidence not to fear their own. It creates a positive trajectory – my kids’ lives will be better than mine. But when the welfare state starts to slip away, it becomes part of the past. It is regarded nostalgically, as an aspect of a lost golden age. This shift in time is one of the key reasons why there could after the end of the Seventies be no future in England’s dreaming. England began to be viewed in the rear-view mirror.
There was always, moreover, a link between the rise of reactionary and xenophobic nationalism in England and inadequacies in the functioning of the welfare state. Camilla Schofield, in her reading of the tsunami of letters sent by supporters to Enoch Powell after the ‘rivers of blood’ speech predicting a racial apocalypse, notes that ‘Powell’s letter-writers speak of student protests, labour unrest, but most of all they speak of the indignities of declining welfare provisions – filled hospital beds and unavailable council houses… concern that immigration could destroy the National Health Service and public housing ran throughout.’30 The Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum would of course make the same false connection: we are anti-immigrant because we wish to defend the welfare state. Powell didn’t actually believe in the welfare state, and most of the leading Brexiteers don’t either, but they knew that many of their supporters did so.
It may be, too, that what lingered in England’s collective consciousness from the extraordinary success of the Labour government in creating the welfare state in a few short years after the end of the war was a distorted idea of radical change. What Britain experienced in those post-war years was a bloodless revolution – a rapid and radical reordering of society achieved democratically and without violence.
Brexit, too, is an attempt at a bloodless revolution and as such a kind of parodic replay of the previous one in which seriousness becomes game-playing, meticulous planning becomes seat-of-the-pants opportunism, a profound sense of public duty becomes narcissistic posturing and deep, difficult change becomes epic symbolism: the first time as policy, the second time as performance.
These three conditions – the renewal of disappointed expectations, the need for a new scapegoat and the erosion of the welfare state – allowed something quite extraordinary to happen. If England’s deep problems were that it had lost an empire but not gained a role, and that it had won a great war but not gained the fruits of victory, a kind of solution became imaginatively possible: that the country should change places. This is one possible answer to the deflationary sensation so perfectly captured in a question mark in Jane Gardam’s novel of the dissolution of the Raj, Old Filth: ‘When empires end, there’s often a dazzling finale – then—?’31 Well, perhaps empires don’t quite end when you think they do. Perhaps they have a final moment of zombie existence. This may be the last stage of imperialism – having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.
Instead of being an imperial power, could England not be imagined as a colony? Instead of being a victor, could England not be imagined as a defeated nation? These are crazy questions but the answer, it turned out in both cases, is yes. It is possible, when overlordship and victory turn sour, to think of oneself as the underdog and the loser. This would be, in Leigh Hunt’s terms, the tribute that self-pity would pay to self-love, a masochistic desire to seek out humiliation combined with a grandiose sense that such humiliation was an outrage against an exceptionally fine people. And, as so often in history, what began as an imaginary indulgence would ultimately try to make itself a reality.
It does not seem entirely beside the point that, in the years immediately leading up to Brexit, by far the biggest-selling book by an English author in any genre was E. L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey. It is a fantasy of submission and dominance. It is not hard to fantasize, in turn, a political adaptation in which Christian Grey is the European Union and Anastasia Steele an innocent England seduced into entering his Red Room of Pain.
For most of the readers of Fifty Shades, the appeal was entirely vicarious. It was not about anything that was or might be real in their lives. It was make-believe bondage – exactly like the Brexiteers’ make-believe version of England’s bondage to Europe. Grey is a Brexiteers’ mad mirage of a Brussels bureaucrat. The book is not about sex – it is about rules. Fifty Shades is, indeed, hilariously bureaucratic. Submission, as it happens, is like EU membership: tediously legalistic. Poor Anastasia finds herself embroiled in complex negotiations before she can get down to business. It is not enough for the Europeans that they get to whip you – they have to torture you with paperwork as well:
‘Here I was foolishly thinking that I’d spend a night of unparalleled passion in this man’s bed, and we’re negotiating this weird arrangement.’
‘You mentioned paperwork.’
‘Yes.’
‘What paperwork?’
The novel comes complete with its own legal apparatus, its sadomaso chistic treaty of accession: ‘The Dominant and Submissive enter into this contract on the Commencement Date fully aware of its nature and undertake to abide by its con ditions without exception.’ Clause 15, paragraph 13 is the secret clause of the European treaties that the Brexiteers always knew was there but could never read before: ‘15.13 The Submissive accepts the Dominant as her master, with the understanding that she is now the property of the Dominant, to be dealt with as the Dominant pleases during the Term generally but specifically during the Allotted Times and any additional agreed allotted times.’
James helpfully reminds her readers of the dictionary definition of submissive. In keeping with the great traditions of the epistolary novel, she reproduces an email:
From: Christian Grey
Subject: Your Issues
Date: May 24 2011 01:27
To: Anastasia Steele
Dear Miss Steele,
Following my more thorough examination of your issues, may I bring to your attention the definition of submissive.
submissive [suhb-mis-iv] – adjective
1. inclined or ready to submit; unresistingly or humbly obedient […]
Synonyms: 1. tractable, compliant, pliant, amenable. 2. passive, resigned, patient, docile, tame, subdued. Antonyms: 1. rebellious, disobedient.
Please bear this in mind for our meeting on Wednesday.
Anastasia, like much of the English population, is deeply uncertain. Rationally, she is drawn to political deal-making: ‘What am I going to do? I want him, but on his terms? I just don’t know. Perhaps I should negotiate what I want. Go through that ridiculous contract line by line and say what is acceptable and what isn’t.’ But, also like England in the sadomasochistic hallucinations of the Brexiteers, she cannot resist the ‘sweet, agonizing torture’ of playing Submissive to Brussels’s Dominant. ‘It is,’ she concedes, ‘so erotic. Truly I am a marionette and he is the master puppeteer.’
The political erotics of imaginary domination and imaginary submission are the deep pulse of the Brexit psychodrama. Wherein lies the vicarious thrill of imagining a wealthy, relatively successful twenty-first-century European country as a marionette controlled by a continental puppeteer? What kick can a still quite influential, prosperous, largely functional country get from thinking of itself, as foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt would do in October 2018, as a nation incarcerated in a neo-Stalinist prison of cruel subjection?
The frisson comes, surely, from the allure of irresponsibility. In the bondage games playing out in the English reactionary imagination, Britain has spent forty-five years hanging from the ceiling in the Red Room of Pain, with clamps on its nipples and a gag in its mouth. For a significant part of its ruling class, this is a posture of absolute powerlessness that corrupts absolutely. The deep problems of class and geographic division, increasing social squalor and rising inequality, cannot be its fault. It has an excuse for everything and responsibility for nothing. There is, paradoxically, a heady, reckless freedom in this dream of surrender. Willed helplessness becomes quite sexy. ‘Picture yourself,’ says Grey, ‘lying here bound and totally at my mercy.’ ‘Oh my,’ says Anastasia.