[The idea of the nation] enables us to daydream as we live out our lives, as the factory-girl daydreams with the aid of her paperback thriller
–ENOCH POWELL
Before the narrative of Len Deighton’s best-selling thriller SS-GB begins, there is a ‘reproduction’ of an authentic-looking rubber-stamped document: ‘Instrument of Surrender – English Text. Of all British armed forces in United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland including all islands.’ It is dated 18 February 1941. After ordering the cessation of all hostilities by British forces, it sets down further conditions, including ‘The British Command to carry out at once, without argument or comment, all further orders that will be issued by the German Command on any subject. Disobedience of orders, or failure to comply with them, will be regarded as a breach of these surrender terms and will be dealt with by the German Command in accordance with the laws and usages of war.’ The novel was published in 1978. In 2014, the BBC announced plans for a five-part TV version, which was screened in 2017, shortly after the Brexit vote.
In the opening pages of the novel, set later in 1941, we meet Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer and his junior sidekick, Detective Sergeant Harry Woods. They have different attitudes to Britain’s defeat and the German occupation: ‘For Harry the fighting would never end. His generation, who’d fought and won in the filth of Flanders, would never come to terms with defeat. But Douglas Archer had not been a soldier. As long as the Germans let him get on with the job of catching murderers, he’d do his work as he’d always done it. He wished he could get Harry to see it his way.’1
Archer continues to work at ‘Whitehall 1212, Headquarters of Kriminalpolizei, Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitsdienst and Gestapo’, reporting to Gruppenführer Fritz Kellermann. He is featured in a glossy propaganda magazine: ‘Like most of London’s policemen he welcomes the modern and scientific crime-fighting methods introduced by his new German commander. Superintendent Archer – and his colleagues – speak warmly of their General, and secretly refer to him as “Father”.’
Winston Churchill has been executed by an SS firing squad. (It goes without saying that he refused a blindfold and flashed a V sign at his executioners.) The king, half dead from a bomb blast, is being held in the Tower of London. There are ‘special Wehrmacht shows at the Palladium’ and a ‘notorious concentration camp at Wenlock Edge’. There is already ‘a new class of men who had emerged from the wreckage of defeat’: ‘Members of Parliament and members of the puppet government who had learned to play their role in the new Nazi super-state that covered most of Europe… the men of Whitehall; top-ranking bureaucrats whose departments continued to run as smoothly under the German flag as they had under conservative and socialist governments.’
The Germans like Archer: ‘He was “Germanic”, a perfect example of “the new European”.’ And Archer in turn is sympathetic to Harry’s difficulty in accommodating himself to these new realities: ‘“Age is an important part of it,” said Douglas. “At Harry’s age it’s not easy to go suddenly from being at the heart of Empire to being an outpost of an occupied colony.”’
Written amid the anxieties of Britain’s early membership of the European Communities, Deighton’s thriller sets up two ideas that will become important in the rhetoric of Brexit. Since there is no sense that Deighton has a conscious anti-EU agenda in any of this, these ideas seem to arise from a deeper structure of feeling in England. One is the fear of the Englishman like Archer turning into the ‘new European’, fitting himself into the structures of German domination. Archer, at least as we originally encounter him, is a harbinger of the ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ who cannot be trusted to uphold English independence and English values and who therefore functions as the enemy within, the quisling class of pro-Europeans. This is the treason of the elite, the puppet politicians and sleek mandarins who quickly accommodate themselves to the new regime. Deighton was building on real historical memories of the appeasers whose pre-war conduct makes the notion that they would have quickly become collaborators in the event of a defeat to the Nazis highly credible.
But this idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves.
The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from ‘heart of Empire’ to ‘occupied colony’. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonization and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated.
SS-GB was in part the inspiration for an even more successful English thriller, Robert Harris’s multi-million-selling Fatherland, published in 1992 and filmed for television in 1994. Harris had begun the novel in the mid-1980s but abandoned it. He revived and finished it explicitly in the context of German reunification in 1990 and of fears that the enemy Britain had defeated twice in the twentieth century would end the century by dominating it: ‘If,’ Harris wrote in the introduction to the twentieth-anniversary edition in 2012, ‘there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.’2
In retrospect, German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war. Had there been a capacity to generate new narratives of Europe, this could have been shaped as a moment of British vindication – the final working-out of the consequences of Nazism. As Anthony Barnett puts it, ‘The triumph and relief of the unification of Germany could and should have belonged to us in Britain, as well as to Germany itself. It was the final liberation from Nazism, the end of that country’s punishment, a time to welcome a great culture back into our arms.’3
Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis.4 This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. ‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.
In fact, Britain not only did not move on in 1990 – with the resurrection of a united Germany, it moved back. Harris is no anti-European reactionary and would in fact become one of the most furious critics of Brexit. Yet, like Deighton, he was tapping in to profound national anxieties. As a dark fantasy of British defeat, Fatherland is even bleaker than SS-GB.
It is set twenty years on from the British surrender – the protagonist remembers, in 1964:
Peace with the British in ’44 – a triumph for the Führer’s counter-intelligence genius! March remembered how all U-boats had been recalled to their bases on the Atlantic coast to be equipped with a new cipher system: the treacherous British, they were told, had been reading the Fatherland’s codes. Picking off merchant shipping had been easy after that. England was starved into submission. Churchill and his gang of war-mongers had fled to Canada.5
While Deighton’s novel is set immediately after a successful German invasion and deals in part with the emergence of a British Resistance, Harris leaves the reader with no such comfort. Churchill has not even had his final moment of glorious defiance: ‘He’s an old man now. In Canada. He lives there.’6 So does Elizabeth, pretender to the British throne now reoccupied by her uncle King Edward VIII.
The German newspapers carry ads for ‘French perfume, Italian silks, Scandinavian furs, Dutch cigars, Belgian coffee, Russian caviar, British televisions – the cornucopia of Empire spilled across the pages’ – the Empire is now the Reich. There are snippets of news relating to Britain: ‘Herbert von Karajan to conduct a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – the European anthem – at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the Führer’s birthday… In London it had been announced that King Edward and Queen Wallis were to pay a state visit to the Reich in July “further to strengthen the deep bonds of respect and affection between the peoples of Great Britain and the German Reich”.’7 But the real twist of the knife in Harris’s story is that these are unimportant items of trivia concerning an unimportant satellite state of the Greater German Reich. The novel is set in Germany and the main characters are German. There is nothing of significance to say about England twenty years after its surrender.
Except, that is, that it is part of a European Union:
In the West, twelve nations – Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – had been corralled by Germany, under the Treaty of Rome, into a European trading bloc. German was the official second language in all schools. People drove German cars, listened to German radios, watched German televisions, worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behaviour of German tourists in German-dominated holiday resorts, while German teams won every international sporting competition except cricket, which only the English played.8
At one point, the hero, March, is walking in Berlin: ‘He turned right at the European Parliament. The flags of the twelve member nations were lit by spots. The swastika which flew above them was twice the size of the other standards.’9
This mimics, of course, basic aspects of the actual European Community as it came to exist in 1992: the founding Treaty of Rome, the twelve members (with Norway and Finland filling in for Germany itself and Luxembourg which has been annexed to the Reich). But it specifically recasts the community as a forced creation of Germany that is dominated economically, linguistically and culturally by its Nazi masters. The huge swastika flying above the flags of the twelve nations (including, by implication, the Union Jack) is a lurid image of the EU’s reality as a German colonial project.
One need only fast-forward to a tweet in August 2018 by the former Tory and UKIP member of the European Parliament Roger Helmer to understand how literally this fantasy could be taken in Brexit discourse: ‘When I was born, I was not a “European Citizen” (and my father’s generation fought to ensure we should not be German citizens). I am determined that I shall not die as a European Citizen.’10
A dystopian fantasy this may be, but in the English reactionary imagination dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality. Rhetorically, it was a commonplace among British anti-Europeans that the EU was a continuation in another, more insidious form, of previous attempts at domination from the continent. In 1989, for example, the Bruges Group of anti-European Tories heard Professor Kenneth Minogue of the London School of Economics tell them that ‘the European institutions were attempting to create a European Union, in the tradition of the mediaeval popes, Charlemagne, Napoleon, the Kaiser and Adolf Hitler’.11
The sleight of hand was not subtle: Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project. But the lack of subtlety did not stop the trope from being used in the Brexit campaign: ‘Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this [unifying Europe], and it ends tragically. The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods,’ Boris Johnson told the Daily Telegraph on 15 May 2016, a month before the referendum. That Napoleon and ‘various people’ were not the point of the argument became clear in Johnson’s reiteration of the real point: that the EU was ‘pursuing a similar goal to Hitler in trying to create a powerful superstate’.
While Harris was writing Fatherland in 1990, the British secretary of state for trade and industry, Nicholas Ridley, a close friend and ally of the prime minister Margaret Thatcher, told the Spectator that the European Monetary System being introduced by the EU was ‘all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe… I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot. You might as well give it to Adolf Hitler, frankly. … I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back than simply being taken over by economics.’12 The Spectator’s cover carried the headline ‘Speaking for England’ – a conscious reference back to one of the moments of high drama in September 1939 when Leo Amery in the House of Commons invited Labour’s Arthur Greenwood to ‘Speak for England!’, implying that the appeasing prime minister Neville Chamberlain did not do so. Lest there be any doubt that Ridley was replaying the appeasement crisis, the cover cartoon showed him as having painted a Hitler fringe and moustache on the face of the then German chancellor Helmut Kohl.
Ridley’s remarks were dismissed by Lutz Stavenhagen, minister of state in Kohl’s administration, as the sort of thing that might be heard ‘in the pub after a football match’.13 And Ridley himself had to resign. But these were not the mere rantings of a marginal crank. As Peter Jenkins wrote in the Independent at the time, ‘it is widely supposed that Mrs Thatcher’s heart is with him, if not her head… It is no secret that she, like him, fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. She too instinctively mistrusts the Germans and finds it impossible to forget the experiences of the Second World War.’14
This was evidently true. In November 1974, when she was a contender for the leadership of the Conservatives, Thatcher confessed to the Daily Express that she was still indulging in the ultimate wartime pursuit: food hoarding. She revealed the contents of her emergency larder: eight pounds of granulated sugar, one pound of icing sugar, six jars of jam, six jars of marmalade, six jars of honey, six tins of salmon ‘to make salmon mousse’, four one-pound cans of corned beef, four one-pound cans of ham, two one-pound cans of tongue, one tin of mackerel, four tins of sardines; two one-pound jars of Bovril, twenty tins of various fruits, and ‘one or two’ tins of vegetables.15 ‘I resent,’ she added, ‘being called a hoarder.’ Had she been able to see into the future, she might have pointed out that she was previewing her successors’ plans for a possible no-deal Brexit.
On a more epic level, Thatcher had the Falklands War. It may have been a last hurrah for Britain’s imperial pretensions, but it functioned even better as a kind of epilogue to the great psychodrama of the Second World War and a real-life version of the invasion thrillers. In her victory speech of July 1982, Thatcher was quite explicit in invoking the Falklands as a renaissance of the old wartime spirit, and victory as proof that Britain was no different then from what it had been during its Finest Hour. She chided those who believed that ‘we could never again be what we were’. The doubters ‘were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in ability, in courage, and in resolution. We have not changed. When the demands of war and the dangers to our own people call us to arms – then we British are as we have always been.’16
Yet even in this triumphal mode, Thatcher gave new life to the metaphors of retreat and invasion. ‘We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,’ she said, implying that the nation had been precisely that for a long time. ‘Why,’ she asked, ‘do we have to be invaded before we throw aside our selfish aims and begin to work together…?’
Within this question is a claim: ‘we’ were invaded. The beauty of the Falklands conflict is that it played out the invasion fantasy of SS-GB – a fascist regime violating the sanctity of the homeland – but at a safe distance of almost 8,000 miles. The population of the Falklands – 1,820 people in 1982 – served as a metaphor for the UK. ‘British people,’ said Thatcher, ‘had to be threatened by foreign soldiers and British territory invaded and then – why then – the response was incomparable.’ Her plaintive question – ‘Why do we have to be invaded before we throw aside our selfish aims and begin to work together?’ – contained the assertion that ‘we’ were invaded by fascists: what had not happened in 1939–45 had finally happened in 1982.
It helped that the tiny Falklands population that was serving this microcosmic function was almost entirely white – a ‘British people’ that no longer existed – and that this ‘British territory’ was an almost entirely rural landscape. The Falklands was a kind of make-believe England with no black and brown immigrants. Its pre-industrial terrain was a fantasy version of the post-industrial landscape that Thatcher herself was in fact creating at home in England, without the empty steel plants and rusting machines. The Falklands was literally pastoral – home to 400,000 sheep and their shepherds – and a weird version of J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Shire, itself in turn an imaginary rustic England threatened by power-mad fascistic invaders.
Thatcher’s question, however, itself expressed a deeper fear. Even while celebrating the wartime spirit of Britain, she was asking why it could not express itself without war. While citing the Falklands as proof that Britain could ‘again be what we were’ in 1939–45, Thatcher was also raising an anxious query about Britain itself: was it only in wartime that it really existed as a polity that transcended its deep divisions of national identity and class interest? Without war, did it really exist at all? In retrospect, for a triumphal address, Thatcher’s speech is remarkably open in its existential anxiety: ‘British people had to be threatened by foreign soldiers and British territory invaded and then – why then – the response was incomparable. Yet why does it need a war to bring out our qualities and reassert our pride?’
Why do we have to be invaded in order to exist as a collective entity? It is a remarkable question for the leader of a state that had not in fact been successfully invaded since it was formed in 1707, and of an island that had not suffered any serious external invasion since 1066? Implied in the question is an existential terror: without invasion do ‘we’ really exist at all? In this light, novels like SS-GB and Fatherland are not just masochistic fantasies, they are symptoms of a much deeper pathology in which pain is an existential necessity. In this distorted self-image, the UK itself is like the body of Frankenstein’s monster: it can be animated only by the galvanic shock of invasion. Without the collective anguish of forced penetration, it would have no underlying collective life at all. Thatcher’s cry – ‘All over Britain, men and women are asking – why can’t we achieve in peace what we can do so well in war?’ – is haunted by the most obvious answer: we can’t. And as the subsequent failures of British military power in Iraq and Afghanistan would show, it was not just war that was needed to reassure Britain that it had a meaningful collective existence, it was the idea of invasion and submission.
The problem is that there was no sadist to act as the external partner required for this masochistic fantasy. The cryptofascist Argentinian military junta served, for a short while, as the perfect collaborator, and the remarkable speed and power with which Britain responded to its aggression showed how deep a need it was fulfilling. But the fix was temporary. The Falklands was Britain as Fortinbras, who will ‘find quarrel in a straw/ When honour’s at the stake’. It was not Britain as Hamlet, agonized by existential questions of purpose and meaning. And there was no one else to play the required role of invader – even the ramping up of the Soviet threat by Ronald Reagan and Thatcher was curiously ineffective, not least because the danger of nuclear war was too hugely existential to serve as a microcosmic metaphor.
The Falklands War, for all its grotesque elements, might have been a moment of release, a way of getting all the dark fantasies of invasion and heroic resistance out of England’s system once and for all: this time we really were invaded by Nazis and we won. But Thatcher could not achieve this moment of release and transcendence because she could not answer her own question. The neoliberal project, with its flaying of the state, was entirely at odds with the collectivist command economy of wartime. Thatcher, in her victory speech, acknowledged that ‘it took the battle in the South Atlantic for the shipyards to adapt ships way ahead of time; for dockyards to refit merchantmen and cruise liners, to fix helicopter platforms, to convert hospital ships’. In other words, without the South Atlantic, those dockyards would lie idle. In the wake of what was above all a demonstration of Britain’s sea power, its shipyards would continue to close and dwindle. The great capacities of their workers would go back to being unwanted. A very different wartime metaphor would soon take hold: that Thatcher’s governments did more damage to Britain’s industrial cities than the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign.
There could be no release from the dark fantasies haunting the imagination of British conservatism, and there would continue to be a need for an imaginary invader and dominator. In 1990, while Germany was being reunified, there was very little depth to anti-German feeling in Britain – surveys at the time showed that most British people were in favour of German unity and trusted the Germans a lot or somewhat. The imagining of a German-dominated Europe through the evocation of Hitler was not an authentic popular prejudice against an old enemy. It was a way – albeit one that still seemed to have few real-world consequences – of thinking about the European Union itself, of summoning it into being as the ghastly ghost, not just of the Nazis but of Nazis who had in reality won the war.
The war imagery filled a hole. England had no deep imaginative commitment to the European project. As an idea, the EU had a distinctly weak grip on English allegiance. It was always understood by most people as a more or less grudging concession to reality, a matter for resigned acceptance rather than joyous embrace. The popular mood a year after Britain joined was nicely captured by an official at the Department of Trade and Industry who likened the British public to ‘a crowd of holidaymakers who, after much doubt and expense, have made a dangerous journey only to find the climate chilly, the hotel not what it was cracked up to be and the food too expensive… bloodthirsty feelings are mounting, not only towards the other nationalities in the hotel but to the courier who got them there.’17
The sheer volatility of public opinion in Britain was clear in the 1975 referendum on whether or not to stay in the Common Market: between January and June 1975, Harold Wilson’s government managed to turn a 57 per cent Leave preference in polls to a 67 per cent Remain vote on the day.18 The referendum was ‘the only really sustained debate the British had ever had on their role in the world’ and, as the Daily Express put it, in a jubilant editorial: ‘Britain’s Yes to Europe’ had rung ‘louder, clearer and more unanimous than any decision in peacetime history’.19
Yet a result that seemed both decisive and conclusive proved to be neither – Europe continued to poison British politics. And perhaps one of the reasons it did so is that, as the 1975 referendum campaign showed, there was a very deep underlying division about the meaning of the Second World War. The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975, many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters. But instead of this common experience creating a common emotional ideal of Britain’s relationship to Europe, it fed two completely opposite stories, each very deeply felt.
One of these stories was that the catastrophic experience of the first half of the twentieth century carried two lessons that must never be forgotten: unrestrained nationalism led to war, and Britain could not stand aside from the fate of Europe. As Robert Saunders has shown, the successful pro-European campaigners in 1975 were both highly explicit and highly emotive in making these connections. For them, ‘the emphasis was on the horror of war, which had devoured millions of lives in the prosecution of national rivalries. Britain in Europe used the poppy, the flower of remembrance, in its literature, while its logo was a dove of peace.’ Pro-Europe posters said ‘Nationalism kills’ and ‘No more Civil Wars’. Another, published for the anniversary of victory in Europe, directly evoked the joy of that triumph and sought to channel it into a sense that the Common Market was the great reward for victory: ‘On VE Day we celebrated the beginnings of peace. Vote Yes to make sure we keep it.’ Another poster read simply: ‘Forty million people died in two European wars this century. Better lose a little sovereignty than a son or daughter.’20
These appeals worked for the majority of voters, but this very mention of sovereignty opened up, for a significant minority, a gaping wound. ‘For some,’ writes Saunders, ‘the surrender of national sovereignty to the EEC was a betrayal of all those who had fought and died “to deliver Europe from Nazi dictatorship”.’ A woman from Bournemouth wrote to the anti-EEC Labour minister Barbara Castle that ‘I… did not fight and suffer a war for six years to be dictated to by the Germans.’ ‘Hitler’s ghost,’ wrote another of Castle’s correspondents, ‘must be shaking with laughter at Roy Jenkins, Hattersley & the rest of the traitor crew.’ Some, Saunders writes, ‘viewed the Community as a new power-grab by Germany, a country which “on two occasions… has failed to conquer the British militarily”’. For Castle’s correspondents, the notion ‘that the GERMANS love us any more today than they did in 1914 & 1939’ was dismissed with contempt. ‘The leopard does not easily change its spots.’
What’s striking is that we can begin to see in this hysterical rhetoric the outlines of two notions that would become crucial to Brexit discourse. One is the comparison of pro-European Brits to quislings, collaborators, appeasers and traitors. The Leave campaign in 1975 likened the Treaty of Accession to the Munich Agreement of 1938, remembered as a shameful act of surrender to the Germans. Christopher Frere-Smith, who ran the Get Britain Out campaign, warned repeatedly that accession to the Common Market marked a ‘new Munich’, with Ted Heath and Roy Jenkins (who was leading the In campaign) playing the roles of Neville Chamberlain and his foreign secretary Lord Halifax. Voters were warned not be ‘fooled by the press bosses and the establishment politicians. They were wrong about Hitler and they’re wrong again.’
But the other idea is the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom. The executed leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, for example, stand as resonant examples of the potency of the myth of blood sacrifice. But in the ironic reversal of zombie imperialism, the appropriation of the imagery of resistance to a former colonizing power, this romance of martyrdom is mobilized as defiance of the EU.
In his anguished complaint about the vitiating effects of membership of the Common Market in 1977, Enoch Powell lamented: ‘The breath which condemns submission to laws this nation has not made condemns submission to scales of value which this nation had not willed. To both sorts of submission I ascribe the haunting fear, which I am sure I am not alone in feeling, that we, the British, will soon have nothing left to die for. That was not a slip of the tongue. What a man lives for is what a man dies for, because every bit of living is a bit of dying. Patriotism is to have a nation to die for, and to be glad to die for it – all the days of one’s life.’21 This takes martyrdom to new levels of self-annihilating fantasy: death in the anti-EU resistance is not a fate or even an act. It is a daily pleasure.
The anti-Europe campaign in 1975 very consciously evoked the language of wartime resistance. The Common Market Safeguards Campaign published a newspaper called Resistance News, and the group of MPs around the leading Tory leaver, Neil Marten, was known as the ‘R’ Group – R for resistance. During the war, Marten had been dropped into both France and Norway to work with the resistance movements, so presumably his followers could think of themselves operating behind enemy lines in deepest Dorset. All of this is much more ’Allo, ’Allo! than Army of Shadows, tragedy played out the second time as farce. But, in what would become the camp sitcom of Brexit, that would not diminish its force.
It is worth noting in passing that this auto-cruelty was not unprecedented – a version of it existed even during the actual war. In this version, what was at work was not so much the desire to be invaded as the idea that parts of England somehow deserved to be bombed by the Luftwaffe. Cyril Connolly wrote in Horizon in 1943:
There are vast districts of London – Bayswater, for example, or Kensington – which seem to have been created for destruction, where squares and terraces for half a century have invited dilapidation, where fear and hypocrisy have accumulated through interminable Sunday afternoons until one feels, so evil is the atmosphere of unreality and suspense, that had it not been for the bombers, the houses would have been ignited one day of their own accord by spontaneous combustion. Behind the stucco porches and the lace curtains the half-life of decaying Victorian families guttered like marsh-gas. One has no pity for the fate of such houses, and no pity for the spectacular cinemas and fun-palaces of Leicester Square, whose architecture was a standing appeal to heaven to rain down vengeance on them.22
John Betjeman had already summoned the Heinkel HE 111s in 1937: ‘Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!/ It isn’t fit for humans now…’ There was in the English imagination, long before Fatherland in the 1990s, already this strain of demented death-wishing, an ecstatic acid trip in which snobbish disgust at actual English modernity – cinemas, fun-palaces, suburbs – tips over into a lust for self-destruction. A fallen England deserves the punishment of bombardment or invasion, a purgatorial vengeance that will shock it back to itself. A good thumping would get the true blood flowing again. The problem with the EU, in this disordered mindset, is not that it is an invading force but that its takeover is too stealthy to deliver the salutary shock of deserved punishment.
Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted. It does not greatly matter what the European Union is or what it is doing – its function in the plot is to be a more insidious form of Nazism. This is important to grasp, because one of the key arguments in mainstream pro-Brexit political and journalistic discourse would be that Britain had to leave because the Europe it had joined was not the Europe it found itself part of in 2016. In Andrew Gilligan’s formulation on the fortieth anniversary of British accession in 2012, ‘The British people joined, and were happy to join, a common market. They did not sign up to a social chapter, a single currency or any moves down the road to a superstate.’23 Or as Boris Johnson put it in September 2017, the ‘post-imperial future’ was ‘sold to the people purely as a common market, a way of maximising trade’. But ‘Then came the gradual realisation that this was a very different agenda, an attempt not just at economic but political integration of a kind that the British people had never bargained for.’24
In itself, this is no more than usually mendacious – the truth being that ‘ever closer union’ was always an explicit part of what the British signed up to in 1973 and voted for in 1975. What matters, though, is the way it misses the point. The idea of Europe as a soft-Nazi superstate was vividly present in 1975, even when the still-emerging EU had a much weaker, less evolved and less intrusive form. The imaginary existential struggle between the gallant English Resistance and the Euroreich was already being played out in one part of English consciousness. It was not a product of the ways in which the nine-member Common Market became the twenty-eight-member European Union. It was a product of England’s deeply divided and strangely unsettled relationship to the Second World War and what it meant.
This is why it did not disappear after the apparently conclusive decision of 1975. It lay quiet for a while but emerged again in an appropriately demented form – the mad cow war. This half-forgotten episode of national hysteria is notable in the first place because the crisis that led to it was entirely self-inflicted by the British state. And it was, furthermore, an example, not of the alleged overregulation of British life by Brussels but of reckless underregulation driven by neoliberal ‘free market’ ideology. Yet it came to be construed as a replay of the Second World War, a lurid example of the interaction between shame, scapegoating and self-pity.
The mad cow crisis had its roots in 1981, when Margaret Thatcher’s government was in the full flush of its early zeal. Proposals for tight controls over the processing of animal protein that had been prepared under the previous Labour government were dropped, and instead ministers decided the industry itself should decide how best to manufacture meat and bone meal that was fed to cattle.25 The industry lowered the temperatures at which rendering of sheep offal was carried out. As a result, sheep scrapie was passed on to cattle in the form of BSE, which then further spread as the parts of diseased cows were themselves converted to animal feed. This entered the food chain and created a human form of the disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), which inflicted a slow and agonizing death on its victims.
The official response to this potential disaster was summed up in a staged event in May 1990, the same month in which the two German states signed a treaty of reunification. The Tory agriculture minister John Gummer force-fed his own four-yearold daughter Cordelia a beef burger in front of TV camera crews and newspaper reporters. This was a genuine moment of national humiliation, the ideas both of good government and of ‘the roast beef of Old England’ as a symbol of national identity turned to grotesque self-mockery. Someone had to be to blame – and it was, of course, the Germans. Germany, frustrated at the very slow and weak response of the European Union, imposed a unilateral ban on the import of British beef. This became a declaration of war, with England again standing alone against the Teutonic menace.
‘Germans urged to call truce in “mad cow” war’ ran the Daily Mail headline in January 1990 over a report that claimed Britain’s chief veterinary officer Keith Meldrum had staged a ‘confrontation’ in Brussels and demanded that the Germans ‘prove that British beef is unsafe’. While the Germans were asking for beef imports to be accompanied by certificates that they were free of BSE, Meldrum said, ‘I will not issue those totally and completely unnecessary certificates. British meat is absolutely healthy. I’ve not changed my eating habits.’ The subtext in the report was that it was a declaration of hostilities by the Germans to refuse to take an Englishman’s word: ‘West Germany was under pressure yesterday to end its “mad cow” war which is costing British farmers millions of pounds in lost beef exports.’26
This German ‘war’ lasted in the right-wing English press for a full decade – almost twice as long as the actual war of which it was a hallucinatory reprise. The War of Cordelia’s Burger was fought mostly through journalistic hyperventilation. ‘A small Somerset town finds itself at war with Germany’ is the head line on a 1996 report in the Daily Express that representatives from the Bavarian town of Immenstadt had asked not to be served British beef at a ceremony in Wellington to mark the twinning of the two towns.27 ‘Kohl’s beef blitzkrieg’ (Express, 9 May 1996), ‘French set to back down as Germans hot up beef war’ (Express, 1 November 1999), ‘Beef War: I’ll Bring Britain To Its Knees’ (Express, 27 October 1999), ‘Battle lines drawn for new beef war’ (Daily Mail, 5 August 1999), ‘Time to retaliate’ (Daily Mail editorial, 9 October 1999 – ‘The British government should order immediate retaliatory action’) – the war dragged ever onwards. The Daily Express even managed to place it deep within England’s military history, with a photograph, under the banner ‘Stop the Euro-Rot’ and the headline ‘Beefeaters sign on for a steak in history’, of three newly recruited Tower of London guards in their fauxmedieval uniforms: ‘Britain signed up three new recruits yesterday as the battle raged to save our beef from the bureaucrats of Brussels. And with centuries of proud tradition behind them, Beefeaters Andrew Thomson, Trevor Hughes and Philip Parker swore allegiance to the Queen and their favourite meat.’28 The men looked sternly ready to force-feed German children with honest British burgers.
In 1996, when England hosted the European Football Championship, one Tory minister, Gillian Shepherd, objected to the use of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ as the official anthem of the championship because the composer was German. Under the headline ‘The Dunkirk spirit’, The Times reported that the German team at Euro ’96 was importing its own beef: ‘the Football Association was displaying a healthy Dunkirk spirt. Scotch beef is still on the menu for England.’29 The Sun warned its readers of ‘a showdown’ with the European Community ‘on a scale rarely seen since the Battle of Britain’. The beef ban was forcing ‘us to fight to save our traditions and freedoms’. The paper urged its readers to harass German tourists – and even to boycott German pornographic films.30 The Daily Mail offered readers a handy list of items they could boycott in order to do their part in the war: ‘Cut out and take when you go shopping: Say NO to these German… foods’, including Tesco Black Forest Ham, Black Tower wine, Milka chocolate and John West canned herring fillets.31
Ludicrous as all of this is, it should be borne in mind that the tabloids had no trouble finding scholarly intellectuals to justify it. In a double-page spread in 1999, the Daily Mail ran a large photo of fake Nazis from ’Allo ’Allo! with a think-piece headlined ‘In the week that Germany kept the old feud alive by illegally banning British beef: Why it’s a good thing for us to be beastly to the Germans.’ It was written, not by some hack, but by the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson. He found a way to argue both that the ‘war’ with Germany was entirely phoney and that it was nonetheless worth continuing because it was somehow in Europe’s best interests. While conceding ‘The reality is that we have more in common with the Germans than with any other European people’, Ferguson managed to conclude that ‘bad Anglo-German relations were (paradoxically) a good thing. To be precise: it would really be rather bad for everyone else in Europe if Britain and Germany did strike up a firm alliance.’32
This, too, is highly characteristic of the kind of discourse from which Brexit emerged, a peculiar cocktail of raw xenophobic hysteria, cool intellectual glibness and pure pantomime. The invasion metaphor could be deployed slickly by a high-class columnist like Michael Gove in The Times: ‘The Social Chapter opt-out has been a legislative Maginot Line, unable to prevent directives infiltrating British law.’33 Or it could be full, foaming self-lacerating rage at the native quislings kowtowing to the Euronazis, as in a Mail article by Simon Heffer: ‘It is typical of this gutless Government, in its prostrate dealings with our masters in Brussels, that it should represent the avoidance of a complete humiliation by trumpeting a partial one as some sort of triumph.’34
Yet what brings these disparate modes together is the lure of self-pity, the weird need to dream England into a state of awful oppression. If we return to Nicholas Ridley’s rant, the striking thing is the way it wishes Britain back into wartime: ‘I’d rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back.’ This suggests that what Britain was experiencing in the 1990s at the hands of the EU was actually worse than the war of 1939–45 in which it triumphed.
And what could be worse than winning the war? Only losing it. Ridley’s conjuring of the EU as a ‘German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe’ evokes a worse kind of invasion than that in Deighton’s SS-GB: invasion by stealth. The suggestion is that a physical invasion by the Nazis would have been preferable to the membership of the EU which achieved the same ends by more cunning and dishonourable means.
At least the Nazis could have been, in Churchill’s great and galvanic rhetoric, fought on the beaches, hills, fields and streets. They offered the ‘chance to fight back’. The new German invasion, cloaked in the guise of peaceful co-operation, is more damnable because it does not give the English Resistance a proper physical target. Hostility to the EU thus opens the way to a bizarre logic in which a Nazi invasion would have been, relatively speaking, welcome. And of course this twisted reasoning is also self-generating: the very nonexistence of the invasion, the lack of any evidence beyond the German reluctance to emulate Cordelia Gummer and submit to being fed BSE burgers is an enraging proof of its insidiousness.
This is a deeply strange kind of displacement – a victor learning to think like the vanquished. But it makes a kind of sense. On the one hand, as the White Paper on entry to the Common Market emphasized in 1971, the experience of not being invaded was one of the genuinely distinctive things about being British: ‘Our physical assets and our economy had suffered less disastrously than those of other Western European countries as a result of the war: nor did we suffer the shock of invasion. We were thus less immediately conscious of the need for us to become part of the unity in Europe...’35 Yet the paper went on to contrast the fate of Britain since the war with that of the six members of the existing Common Market, all of whom had been invaded:
The contrast between their experiences in recent years as members of the Communities, and ours outside, when our resources have not been growing sufficiently to do all we should like to do at home and abroad, suggests that they chose the right road… All the Community countries enjoyed rates of growth of gross national product (GNP) per head of population, or of private consumption per head, roughly twice as great as Britain’s…36
It was not entirely ridiculous at some subliminal level to see these two things – being invaded and growing twice as fast as the country that wasn’t – as cause and effect. The ‘right road’ to prosperity did not seem to lie through successful self-defence – on the contrary, invasion worked well for the Six. Britain was genuinely in a topsy-turvy situation, the winner that had been surpassed by the losers. Why not draw a topsy-turvy conclusion: in a dark stratum of the reactionary mind, we must think of ourselves as a defeated nation? And if Britain was to be defeated, the EU must be its invasive oppressor. Must be because there was no other possible candidate.
The very absurdity of this notion was its strength. The paranoiac must at some stage ask himself: but why are they out to get me? Since there was no actual evidence of any Western European hostility, the answer must lie in some deeply hidden motivation. How could they hate us when we saved them in the war? The proto-Brexiteers came up with a counter-factual truth that was at the same time highly satisfying: they hate us because we saved them.
Bernard Connolly, an English economist sacked by the European Commission because he had objected (not unreasonably) to the creation of the euro currency and an influential figure in subsequent anti-EU discourse in England, explained the mystery in 1996 specifically in the context of the BSE war: ‘“Britain Screwed by Europe” has been the recurrent experience ever since Edward Heath took us into the then EEC. Why? Is it just that our government and civil servants have been a soft touch?’ No, he suggested, this was not enough to explain the malice because
our Continental ‘partners’ should love us. But they do not. Do they despise us for our weakness? Or is there something about the way we think and do things that just gets up Continental noses? Are we being punished for being British? There is certainly a feeling in Europe that Britain has got away too lightly in the bloody mess that Europe has been since history began. In particular we are the one EU nation (with the exception of Sweden…) that escaped catastrophic military defeat, occupation, dictatorship, or dismemberment in or after the Second World War. All that is regarded as ‘not fair’ by the politicians and bureaucrats of our Continental neighbours. To make things even worse, it was British resistance to Hitler that kept the spark of freedom and civilisation alive until the European war became a world war. The decadence of the French ruling class contributed disgracefully to France’s military defeat. And that class and its successors has never forgiven the Western allies for inflicting the even greater humiliation of rescuing their country.37
This is the perfect-circle of self-pity and self-love: we deserve to be loved but we are hated because we are so wonderful.
Len Deighton’s imaginary surrender order had deep roots in British public debate. Since the English mood in relation to joining Europe was largely one of surrendering to necessity, it was not so hard to think of the act as surrender full stop. In Encounter’s 1971 symposium on whether the UK should join the Common Market, for example, Sir William Hayter, Warden of New College, Oxford, and former British Ambassador to Moscow, looked back on his contribution to its debates almost a decade earlier: ‘in 1962 I wrote that “in a few years we shall have to make an unconditional surrender to get in.” I am afraid those few years have gone by, and now it is not even certain that an unconditional surrender will get us in.’38
Peter Shore MP, the most persistent Labour Party critic of Europe, during the 1975 referendum took up this theme: ‘What the advocates of membership are saying… is that we are finished as a country; that the long and famous story of the British nation and people has ended; that we are now so weak and powerless that we must accept terms and conditions, penalties and limitations almost as though we had suffered defeat in a war.’39 As though we had suffered defeat in a war – there is no phrase more accurately expressive of the extraordinary embrace by the victors of the self-pity of the vanquished.
These images would return in the immediate years before Brexit. In Owen Sheers’ novel Resistance, published in 2007 and adapted for film in 2011, it is the autumn of 1944: ‘First the failed landings in Normandy. Then the German counter-attack. The pages of the newspapers were dark with the print of the casualty lists. London was swollen with people fleeing north from the coast…’40 The theme of quislings and traitors is taken up: it turns out that the Allied D-Day invasion plans had been betrayed to the Germans by a sleeper agent posing as ‘a bank clerk in Brighton’. As the Germans advance into England, there are ‘calls for peace, for surrender, from politicians the Home Service called “traitors”’. Native collaborators are operating ahead of the German advance, spreading rumours and panic. When one is caught, ‘His accent had been perfect but then it transpired this wasn’t because he was German at all but English.’ A German proclamation says that ‘British authorities may continue to function if they maintain a correct attitude’. The comic old codgers of Dad’s Army are being ruthlessly slaughtered by the Wehrmacht: ‘The British soldier was old… Grey hair, rheumy eye. Ehrhardt had bayoneted him with anger, with force, in textbook style. And now here he was laughing.’ Nelson’s Column is ‘sliced in two and tipped onto the loading platforms of a transport lorry to be taken back as a trophy to Berlin’. Hitler stands on Parliament Hill ‘promising “to bring peace at last to this nation misguided for so long by the corrupt democracy that once sat in those shattered buildings beneath us”’.41 Churchill has followed King George to Canada. Rab Butler heads a quisling government based in Harrogate. An SS Albion division is formed.
Strikingly, when men of fighting age are deported, ‘The German propaganda machine and William Joyce’s BBC were calling these deportations Britain’s contribution to “the rebuilding of a new United Europe”.’ The resistance, holed up in underground bunkers, plants roadside bombs and ambushes isolated German units. Its members are told in advance that they can expect to survive on average for two weeks. But they have, as Enoch Powell would have put it, a country to die for in their heroic defiance of this Nazified United Europe.
In C. J. Sansom’s 2012 novel Dominion, another best-selling English thriller based on a successful Nazi takeover in 1940, after a British surrender at Dunkirk, we find speculation in 1952, when the novel is set, that ‘the Queen’s Coronation next year will be in some way combined with celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of Herr Hitler’s accession to power in Germany’ – the most potent drama of British sovereignty reimagined as a grotesque puppet show, majesty turned to subjection. In his bibliographical note Sansom notes, ‘In looking at how a British Resistance movement might have fought a collaborationist regime, the closest (though not exact) parallel has to be the French Resistance.’42 (Sansom’s book was animated in particular by fear of Scottish independence, and its depiction of a pro-Nazi collaborationist Scottish National Party in 1952 is explicitly aimed at discouraging support for the contemporary SNP – in an appendix, he directly urges readers to donate to and support the ‘No’ campaign in the impending referendum of 2014.)
The pay-off for all of this lurid imagining would come with Brexit. In February 2016, when David Cameron was seeking concessions from Brussels in advance of the Brexit referendum, the Daily Mail, forgetting its own history of appeasement, brazenly compared him to Neville Chamberlain in a rabid front-page editorial headed, of course ‘Who will speak for England?’43 (While drawing these parallels between the Nazis and the EU, it added in the smaller print, ‘Nobody is suggesting there are any parallels whatever between the Nazis and the EU.’)
The Leave.EU campaign ran images of Chelsea Pensioners with the slogan ‘Freedom and democracy. Let’s not give up values for which our ancestors fought.’44 Its funder Arron Banks claimed he was handed a letter and donation for £30 by a Second World War veteran: ‘I am an old soldier from the last war. I remember the French and Belgians in 1940, what we called the surrender monkeys… who we saved. My father was an Old Contemptible in France in 1914. He says you can’t trust them and they proved him right. We were never thanked.’ (The old veteran was a far-seeing visionary, or perhaps just a fan of The Simpsons, where the term ‘surrender monkey’ was invented in 1995.)
The most peculiar result of all of this strange history of imagining the EU as really a front for a German plot to achieve by stealth what Hitler had failed to achieve by force came in the immediate period after the referendum. If you’ve thrilled yourself with these dark imaginings you end with the ultimate in wish-fulfilment: the EU is a front for a German cabal and this will save Brexit. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers. For some of those at the top of the Labour Party, the idea of the EU as a mere front for the bosses and moguls of Europe was a reason to be secretly pleased that Brexit would allow Britain to escape their clutches and build socialism in one country. But on the Tory Right, the German moguls were, for a brief shining moment, not oppressors but saviours. David Davis said during the referendum campaign that ‘the first calling point of the UK’s negotiator in the time immediately after Brexit will not be Brussels, it will be Berlin to strike the deal. Absolute access for German cars and industrial goods in exchange for a sensible deal on everything else.’ A year after the referendum, when Davis was the UK’s lead negotiator as secretary of state for Brexit, Andrew Marr put it to him: ‘You basically argued that the German car industry, and German industry generally, would put pressure on the German chancellor who would put pressure on the EU to ensure that we got a good deal. Is that still your view?’ ‘Oh,’ replied Davis, ‘that’s where it will end up, yeah.’
Boris Johnson was even more explicit in the BBC’s big set-piece final debate before the referendum in June 2016. ‘Everyone knows this country receives about one-fifth of Germany’s entire car manufacturing output,’ he said. ‘Do you seriously propose that they are going to be so insane as to allow tariffs to be imposed?’ The key word here is ‘allow’. How telling it is. It reveals an entire view of how the world really works. Even while Brexit was posing as an exercise in returning control to the populace, Johnson was letting slip his understanding of where control really lay. The chain of reasoning began with a factual proposition: the Germans sell a hell of a lot of cars to the UK. The next link in the chain is rational: therefore, the German car manufacturers would not want any tariff barriers to be created after Brexit. And then there is the great leap. Seeing their interests threatened, the bosses of Mercedes and Audi would lift the phone to the chancellery. ‘Merkel!’ they would bark. ‘There must be no tariff barriers. We will not allow it!’ Angela Merkel in turn would call Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk: ‘The British must have their cake and eat it. Understood?’ ‘Jawohl!’ BMW means Brexit Made Wonderful.
In part, this stems from a most rarefied political plant: Tory Marxism. Edward St Aubyn epitomized it in Some Hope: ‘They’re the last Marxists… The last people who believe that class is a total explanation. Long after that doctrine has been abandoned in Moscow and Peking it will continue to flourish under the marquees of England. Although most of them have the courage of a half-eaten worm… and the intellectual vigour of dead sheep, they are the true heirs of Marx and Lenin.’45 In an elitist view of the world, rules would not matter. The EU’s institutions were Potemkin villages, flimsy and easily knocked over. Brexit would, naturally, be settled behind the scenes by unelected power-brokers. Merkel would do as she was told and, as the EU is a German front, Brussels would snap its heels and produce the proper offer of infinite cake.
That this belonged in the realm of an imaginary construct is obvious from its most glaring contradiction: if the German car bosses could order Merkel to produce a lovely Brexit for Britain, why could the British car bosses, who opposed Brexit, not stop it altogether? The answer, of course, is that all of this resulted from a fantasy about Germany and the EU that had been played out in books, films and tabloid fictions. This was the final stage of the delusion, the one where self-pity becomes pure pleasure. The idea of German oppression had always carried a charge of erotic satisfaction. Now, it would deliver its full load of bliss: secret German domination would save Brexit and open the way to the easiest and best deal in history.
It didn’t, of course, so then there was the rage of further disappointed expectations. From being saviours, the Germans turned back into the Nazis of SS-GB. The rabidly pro-Brexit Express screamed in November 2017: ‘German MEP demands “unconditional SURRENDER” from UK for Brexit talks to progress’, the opening line of the article turning this into a demand by the EU itself: ‘The EU is demanding “unconditional surrender” and an agreement on a £53 billion divorce bill by next Friday before starting trade negotiations.’46 The equally intransigent Telegraph carried similar headlines: ‘Germany expects Brexit secretary David Davis to offer his “unconditional surrender” to the EU’s terms when he delivers a keynote speech to trade chiefs in Berlin on Thursday evening, the former president of the country’s largest trade body has warned.’47 And the Sun: ‘PUT EU HANDS UP. Berlin wants Britain’s unconditional surrender in Brexit talks, claims German official.’48 The UKIP MEP Gerald Batten claimed that ‘The Commission wants unconditional surrender and Mrs May will settle for conditional surrender.’49
The long-running fantasy of imagining ‘we had suffered defeat in a war’ became explicit in the Brexit talks. The Tory MEP Daniel Hannan tweeted in February 2018: ‘Throughout the negotiations, HMG has adopted a friendly and respectful tone. The Brussels institutions respond as if dealing with a hostile power.’50 Hannan further ramped up the metaphorical ‘as if’ in outrage at the failure of the EU to accept Theresa May’s Chequers plan wholesale: ‘No British government could go further to accommodate the EU. If Brussels holds out for more, dictating terms as if to a defeated enemy (my italics), a breakdown is inevitable.’51
As though we had suffered defeat in a war, dictating terms as if to a defeated enemy – there is here a kind of wish-fulfilment. This desire to experience the vicarious thrills of humiliation is possible only in a country that did not know what national humiliation is really like. But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled. In the Brexit negotiations, the idea of national humiliation moved from fiction to reality. There was a strange ecstasy of shame: ‘Britain faces a terrible choice: between the humiliation of a deal dictated by Brussels; and the chaos of crashing out of the EU’;52 ‘A week from hell: How Theresa May’s Panorama positivity turned to humiliation in Salzburg’;53 ‘Failed clean Brexit would be biggest “national humiliation” since the Suez crisis, MPs will warn’;54 ‘Humiliation beckons if we cannot unite around a plan for Brexit’;55 ‘Salzburg humiliation leaves May idling at the Brexit crossroads’;56 ‘Cabinet at war after May’s humiliation in Salzburg’;57 ‘Humiliation for May as EU rejects Brexit plan’.58
With Brexit, England would experience the consequences of not being careful what you wish for.