Lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss
–RUDYARD KIPLING
In September 2016, less than three months after the Brexit referendum, marine researchers manoeuvred a small, remotely operated vehicle through the open hatch of a ship that was lying on the bottom of an Arctic bay. They guided it through a mess hall and found a storage room with plates and a can still sitting on one of the shelves. ‘We spotted two wine bottles, tables and empty shelving. Found a desk with open drawers with something in the back corner of the drawer,’ the director of the operation, Adrian Schimnowski, told the Guardian in an email.1 They had discovered something that the British Admiralty had once spent a long time looking for: the wreck of HMS Terror, one of two ships lost in Sir John Franklin’s doomed attempt to find the Northwest Passage in 1848. Franklin’s expedition, in which all 129 men were lost, was by far the worst disaster in the history of British polar exploration. It was also one of the great episodes in the British cult of heroic failure. The timing could hardly have been more exquisite, for just as dreams of Nazi occupation channelled one aspect of England’s sense of loss – the disappointment of victory in the war – heroic failure spoke to the other, the strange legacy of colonialism. It provides a small window into the second form of self-pity that goes into the making of Brexit: the colonizer imagining itself as the colonized.
Franklin was, as Stephanie Barczewski puts it in her richly illuminating history Heroic Failure and the British, ‘a failure on a monumental scale, but he nonetheless became one of the greatest Victorian heroes’.2 Indeed, Franklin’s story is one of repeated debacle. On his first voyage to find the Northwest Passage in 1819 and 1820, he had to abandon his ship and nine of his twenty men died, ‘some at the hands of others, who were so desperate for food that they resorted to cannibalism’. Yet, on his return to England, Franklin’s journal of the expedition became a best-seller, hailed as a ‘splendid display of those noble qualities which seem particularly distinctive of the Saxon race’.3 This was surely true – Franklin had a particular genius for appealing to the most transformative faculty in the English imagination, the imperial alchemy that turned the lead of dis-aster into the gold of heroism.
His second expedition in 1845 was deeply Brexitlike. As Barczewski explains, it was undertaken in a spirit of blithe optimism: ‘Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners.’4 If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in unmapped wastelands, it may be because the same attitudes have been at work.
The tragicomic outcome was not just that Franklin and his men were lost but that enormous amounts of effort and money were expended on trying to find them. It became a Victorian obsession: over the next decade a total of thirty-eight public and private expeditions, mostly from Britain, but also from the United States and Russia, went to the Arctic to search for Franklin. By 1854, the Admiralty alone had spent £600,000 (tens of millions in today’s values) looking for Franklin. ‘Some of the rescue expeditions had themselves had to be rescued.’5 Heroic failure acted like a magnet, drawing ever more failure towards itself.
But what is even more Brexitlike is the idea that those who ventured out to find Franklin, even if they endured terrible hardships, were seen to have failed, not because the enterprise itself was mad, but because they were insufficiently determined. Lieutenant Sherard Osborn, who led an expedition in 1851, survived vicious storms and brought his men home safe. He was taken aback by his reception when he returned: ‘Our self-importance as Arctic heroes of the first water received a sad downfall when we were first asked by a kind friend what the deuce we came home for?... and why we deserted Franklin?’6 Ironically, when one of the expeditions, led by Robert McClure, did in fact find the entrance to the Northwest Passage, the discovery was virtually ignored. He did not find Franklin and mere reality had long since ceased to matter. No doubt British civil servants trying to map the route to the least damaging Brexit would know exactly how he felt – complicated realities are no match for the glamour of heroic failure.
A crucial difference, though, is that in the traditional English idea of heroic failure, the great point is not to feel self-pity. England’s favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, tells us that Triumph and Disaster are essentially indistinguishable, ‘two impostors just the same’ – a dangerous lesson for a country whose future hangs on the ability to tell the difference. But it also enjoins the English to ‘lose, and start again at your beginnings/ And never breathe a word about your loss’. Losing everything – even life itself – and not whining about it is the traditional English ideal of courage. As Barczewski has it ‘the highest form of English heroism is stoicism in the face of failure’.7
This is the last thing anyone would say about the conduct of Brexit. The only stiff upper lips on display in England now belong to the victims of botched Botox jobs. In a coincidence in its own way as resonant as the finding of HMS Terror, the Royal Mail issued in June 2018, when the Brexit project was in deepest disarray, a set of stamps to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the first screening of the long-running and perennially popular wartime sitcom Dad’s Army. One of the stamps has the catchphrase ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’ printed on a still from the series of Clive Dunn’s elderly Home Guard soldier, Lance Corporal Jones, mouth agape, glasses askew and, of course, in an awful funk.
Brexit has been much more Dad’s Army than ‘If’, more Corporal Jones than Scott of the Antarctic. Derek Mahon’s great poem ‘Antarctica’ encapsulates the self-sacrifice of Scott’s companion, Lawrence Oates, who walked quietly out into the snow to die uttering the immortal line, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’
The others nod, pretending not to know.
At the heart of the ridiculous, the sublime.
It is an acknowledgement that there is, after all, a heroism in heroic failure. But Brexit reverses the order. It occupies this psychic territory but turns its tragic sensibility into farce – at the heart of its sublime the ridiculous.
The grand balls-up is not new, and in English historical memory it is not shameful. Most of the modern English heroes, after all, are complete screw-ups. The exploits that have loomed largest in English consciousness since the nineteenth century are retreats or disasters: Sir John Moore’s evacuation of Corunna in the Peninsular War, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition, ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, the ‘last stand’ against the Zulus at Isandlwana, Gordon of Khartoum, the Somme, the flight from Dunkirk. This culture of heroic failure Barczewski defines as ‘a conscious sense of celebration of the striving for an object that was not attained’. She points, for example, to the ten memorial statues in Waterloo Place, a key site flanking the great processional route up the Mall towards Buckingham Palace: five relate to the disastrous Crimean War, one is of Franklin and one is of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who died with four of his men having failed to get to the South Pole before Roald Amundsen’s pragmatically planned and unromantic Norwegian expedition.
The essence of English heroic failure is Scott reflecting on his own fast-approaching death at the Antarctic: ‘We took risks, we knew we took them. Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last… Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale.’8
There is something genuinely magnificent in this English capacity to embrace disaster. It is also highly creative. It transforms ugly facts into beautiful fantasies. The charge of the Light Brigade was a hideous fiasco. At the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War in October 1854, the British cavalry charged, sabres aloft, at the Russian artillery, down a long valley that was also flanked by Russian guns that could fire on them from above. It was pure, suicidal butchery: survivors wrote things like ‘never was such murder ordered’; ‘Thank God I escaped that dreadful massacre’, ‘a horrible sight for any human being to witness’. Lieutenant Fiennes Wykeham Martin wrote to his brother: ‘My Regiment is cut up and the rest of the Light Brigade are completely annihilated owing to a mistake in the orders… Of 700 men who went into action only 190 came out and all for no good…’9 But the prime minister Lord Palmerston described it as ‘glorious’ and Alfred Tennyson wrote a poem that every schoolboy and schoolgirl, even of my generation in republican Ireland, knew: ‘Theirs not to make reply,/ Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die.’
George Orwell noted in 1941 that Tennyson’s poem still epitomized popular English patriotism: ‘English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance… The most stirring battle-poem in English is all about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.’
He continued, sombrely, to evoke the more recent memory of the Great War: ‘the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.’10
The problem now, however, is that the original English cult of heroic failure was, paradoxically, a symptom of British power. As Barczewski astutely notes: ‘Heroic failure… neither effected nor engendered decline; on the contrary it arose from British power and dominance, and from the need to provide alternative narratives that distracted from its real-life exploitative and violent aspects.’ The English could afford to celebrate glorious failure because they were actually highly successful – the myths of suffering and endurance covered up the truth that it was mostly other people who had to endure the suffering.
Heroic failure was an exercise in transference. The British needed to fill a yawning gap between their self-image as exemplars of liberty and civility and the violence and domination that were the realities of Empire. Some of this could be done by absorbing defeated peoples into the heroic image of the imperial army: the Gaels of the Scottish Highlands, finally crushed in the eighteenth century, or the Gurkhas of Nepal subdued after vicious fighting in the nineteenth. Some could be done by the method Orwell ascribed to most of the English working class: deliberately ‘not knowing that the Empire exists’.11 But heroic failure was an even more powerful mechanism for assuaging guilt: it reimagined the British conquest of the earth as an epic of suffering, not for the victims, but for the victors. It took the pain of the oppressed and ascribed it to the oppressors.
It had to be understood, of course, that heroic failure was not to be treated as an admission of weakness. On the face of it, celebrating disasters seems to be advertising one’s capacity for screwing up. It ought to have invited ridicule, all this getting lost in wildernesses, heading off with bad maps, failing to make plans, not delivering vital messages, sending the cavalry off to charge in the wrong direction. To turn it into a statement of strength, it was crucial that there be no self-pity. Indeed, it was not simply that there must be no self-pity – this absence must itself be supremely present. This is how strong we are: even in the face of disaster we don’t cry, we don’t complain, we don’t stop to reason why and we never breathe a word about our loss. We are going out now and we may be some time.
This is possible only when you are in fact confident of your superiority. Subject cultures have heroic failures – the Battle of Kosovo for the Serbs, the Easter Rising for the Irish – but they dramatize them and saturate them in grief. In its original form, the English cult is not like this at all. It doesn’t have to worry about long-term outcomes, for those will all be successful: the Zulus will be beaten, the Russians will lose the war. Its concern, instead, is with character. Heroic failure became such an important part of British culture because it celebrated personal virtues that were understood to be at the core of national identity and encapsulated in that most English of English words: pluck. It was not about achieving, it was about being – being male and upper class but also being stoical, cool, resilient, uncomplaining, able to endure everything that nature or barbaric peoples could inflict. The personal in this sense was deeply political: a man so utterly in control of himself earned the right to control others.
But what do you do with this habit of mind when you are no longer superior, when you can’t afford to indulge your inherited tastes for grandiose bungling, when your ruling class can’t control even its own buffoonery, but you still have a sweet tooth for these empty calories of heroic failure? In some respects, Brexit is a perfect vehicle for this zombie cult. It fuses three of the archetypes of heroic English failure. There is the last stand, exemplified by the death of General George Gordon at Khartoum, another fiasco that quickly became a byword for heroism in the face of inevitable disaster: Brexit is imperial England’s last last stand. There is the suicidal cavalry charge: the Brexiteers in the heady early days of 2017, threatening Europe that if it does not play nice they will destroy its economic artillery with their flashing sabres. And there is the doomed expedition without a map into a terra incognita that is also a promised land. Yet as heroic exits go, it is not like that of Captain Oates.
The difficulty lies with the question of transference – what is being transferred to whom? In its prime, the cult was, in many ways, the ultimate colonial appropriation. Britain took to itself, not just the resources of the conquered people, but their suffering and endurance. In its Brexit iteration, it has to take this much further: to imagine the greatest colonial power in modern history as itself a colony. This is in its own way quite audacious – England dreaming itself into the status it so triumphantly imposed on others. It is a dramatic bypass operation. In reality, Britain went from being an imperial power to being a reasonably ordinary but privileged Western European country. In the apparition conjured by Brexit, it went straight from being the colonizer to being the colonized.
There is a kind of bridge between the two states: the Dunkirk spirit. It was another surreal coincidence that Christopher Nolan’s epic and vivid movie of the most recent and potent episode of heroic failure hit the screens in 2017, in perfect time to function as a Brexit metaphor. But this is a metaphor that has one leg in heroism, the other in a kind of grandiose banality.
In the early years of the UK’s membership of the Common Market, ‘Dunkirk spirit’ could be used ironically, with a knowing anti-heroic twist. A cartoon in Punch in 1974, commenting on the exodus of Brits to Australia, shows an official at the Australian embassy in London processing a vast queue of would-be emigrants: ‘They’re beginning to show their Dunkirk spirit – They’re even willing to go in small boats.’12 But by the time of the fortieth anniversary of the evacuation, its mythical status as a crucible of English character had been fully re-established. As Robert Harris wrote in May 1990, ‘It was and is an affirmation of our insularity… Our future may lie on the Continent. Our hearts are still in the past, in a mythical world of “little ships” delivering gallant Tommies from the clutches of perfidious, cowardly foreigners.’13
The continuing potency of this myth is embodied in Nolan’s film through Mark Rylance’s moving performance as Mr Dawson, the ordinary Englishman who skippers his own small yacht across the Channel and carries back dozens of men while evading German fighters. Rylance, tellingly, had already incarnated one half of the English male self-image in his sensational stage performance as the Falstaffian Rooster Byron in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem – the strutting, antic, anarchic side of popular Toryism. In Dunkirk he inhabits the other half, the silent, undemonstrative heroic endurance of danger and suffering. He has very few lines and the ones he has are as clipped as anything from Captain Scott or Lawrence Oates – we can quite imagine him saying as he sets out to sea that he is sailing off now and may be some time. He gives nothing away – we do not even learn his first name. But we can guess that he surely endured the Great War and we learn that he has himself lost a son already in this war.
In Rylance’s great performance all this is etched on his face and sunk in the pools of sorrow behind his eyes. It is emphatically not expressed as self-pity – indeed, it vividly re-creates the grand age of English heroism in which self-pity functions as a radiant absence. And it is deeply affecting, so much so that it is possible to believe while watching it that this whole tradition is still alive and politically serviceable, that Brexit itself can somehow be imbued with its superbly tacit glamour, that it, too, can evoke a notion of English suffering that is not saturated in self-pity.
The problem is that the evocation of Dunkirk in real, contemporary English life is the very opposite. It is indeed a prime example of the self-pity inherent in self-dramatizing exaggeration. It is where wartime heroics meets tourism: every large-scale interruption to the travel plans of Brits is, in the media, a new Dunkirk. In 1980, for example, protesting French trawlermen blockaded ports. The Economist reported: ‘The Dunkirk spirit, good and not so good, lives again. Dashing British ferry-boat captains ran the French trawlermen’s blockade of northern French ports; a truce was arranged and 20,000 never-say-die British tourists wriggled out of strike-bound French harbours after effectively being held hostage for several days. British newspapers quoted Henry V.’14
In 2010, when the explosion of a volcano in Iceland caused chaos for travellers, the Financial Times wrote that ‘stranded travellers summoned the Dunkirk spirit to try to get home by bicycle, ferry, powerboat, container ship, or whatever means they could’.15 The Daily Star kept its readers’ spirits up with a stirring tale: ‘BBC newsreader Tim Willcox, 46, was left stranded in Egypt after a holiday with wife Sarah, 39, and children Sophia, 13, George 11, and Tom, eight. He got a flight to Barcelona, then hired a taxi for £300 to take him to Perpignan, France, where he rented a car. Tim, who was driving the family to Calais last night, said: “I will be more than £1,000 out of pocket – but at least there is a real Dunkirk spirit.”’16
In 2012, when some British passengers were on a cruise ship on which a (very minor) fire had broken out, the Sunday Express, under the headline ‘Dunkirk spirit of cruise Brits’, announced: ‘British passengers, among more than 1,000 people onboard a stricken cruise ship adrift in Philippine waters… have been showing the “Dunkirk spirit”. Jeremy Scott said his parents, Valerie and Billy Scott, who are on the Azamara Quest, rang him yesterday in Pinner, Middlesex, to tell him they were “fine”. “There is no panic, everybody is fine. It’s the Dunkirk spirit and they are making the best of the situation.”’17 When ‘Mum and Dad are fine’ (which is the substance of this story) merits a triple dose of Dunkirk spirit, the currency of heroic failure is deeply debased.
This is, as we shall see, much more typical of the Brexit mentality. Mr Dawson’s ‘Dunkirk spirit’ is all about understatement – verbal and emotional. It is a great holding back. The ‘Dunkirk spirit’ that chimes with Brexit is all overstatement – verbal and emotional. It is a great letting go. The grand tradition is a kind of sprezzatura, a studied indifference in which deep feeling expresses itself as nonchalance. It takes big things – appalling suffering and death – and cuts them down to size. The new ‘Dunkirk spirit’ is a kind of hysteria in which the ordinary vicissitudes of life (especially those involving Brits abroad among foreigners) are raised to the level of epic suffering. It is a long way from Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic to Valerie and Billy Scott on the Azamara Quest – the distance between heroic failure as a subtle advertisement of true power and as a compensation for actual weakness. But the end point of the journey would be reached in September 2018, when foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt warned the Europeans that they would be very sorry indeed if they continued to insult Britain by not giving it the Brexit it was demanding: ‘The way Britain reacts is not that we crumble or fold but actually you end up invoking the Dunkirk spirit and we fight back… We are one of the great countries of Europe and there comes a point where we say “we’re not prepared to be pushed around, if you’re not serious about a deal then we won’t be either”.’18
John Cleese wrote in his autobiography about being taken with his entire school to see the Ealing Studios film Scott of the Antarctic in 1948:
We were all deeply impressed by Scott’s uncomplaining acceptance of suffering. But you couldn’t help feeling that the message of the film was not just that the highest form of English heroism is stoicism in the face of failure but that in Scott’s case a whiff of success might have tarnished the gallantry of his silent endurance of misery… in the same way that the magnificence of the Charge of the Light Brigade was enhanced by its utter futility, and General Gordon’s being calmly hacked to death was all the more impressive because it occurred during the complete annihilation of his forces at Khartoum.19
It seems somehow apt that less than thirty years after being impressed by Scott’s uncomplaining endurance, Cleese gave the world an alternative image of Englishness that seems in retrospect more representative of the culture that produced Brexit: a hysterical Basil Fawlty giving a ‘damn good thrashing’ to his broken-down Austin 1100 Countryman Estate with the branch of a tree.
If the point of the cult of heroic failure was to disguise the realities of colonial dominance, it required radical adjustment in the post-imperial context of British membership of the EU. It had to let in the self-pity it had always held at bay. And it did this in the most startling way: by imagining Britain itself as a colony of the EU, a plucky little nation with its own deep traditions that had been annexed by a European superstate. The idea of resistance to this superstate could, as we have seen, plug itself into memories of wartime resistance movements. But an even more powerful generator was the idea of an anti-colonial liberation movement – the very movements that the British had previously sought to crush.
It seems right that, in the early summer of 2018, as Britain’s talks with the EU about withdrawal and future relations were becoming increasingly futile, David Nicholls’ five-part TV adaptation of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels was being screened. The novels are about sadism and masochism – the monstrously sadistic father David and the self-harming behaviour of the son he abused. They unfold in a context that is both upper class and post-imperial – in the first episode of the TV series we see Benedict Cumberbatch’s Patrick in a suicidal frenzy of drug-taking in an extremely expensive hotel, while Cy Endfield’s 1964 movie Zulu, which begins with the great heroic failure of Islandlwana, plays on the television.
This is a subliminal preview of David’s sermon on the infliction of pain as an act of love, which also appropriates the suffering of a defeated and colonized people. Before he sexually abuses his son for the first time, David will tell him: ‘King Shaka was a great and mighty Zulu warrior who made his troops stamp thorn bushes into the ground and march for days across hot, jagged rocks. The soles of their feet were slashed and burnt. And though there was resentment and pain at the time, the calluses this created meant that eventually, nothing would harm them. They would feel no pain. And what had felt like cruelty at the time was actually a gift. It was actually love.’
This draws on a whole history of sadomasochistic imperial education, the toughening-up of white children by savage cruelty in public schools so that they can in turn inflict themselves on lesser peoples. In Jane Gardam’s novel Old Filth, Babs remembers, of this form of education, that ‘The complaining ones were thought to be cowards. We had to copy the Spartans in those days. You should have seen the illustrations in children’s books of the Raj then. Pictures of children beating each other with canes at school. The prefectorial system. Now it would be thought porn.’20
But David Melrose’s parable goes even deeper: he takes the pain of the defeated Zulus and transfers it into his own son’s body and mind by abusing him. This taking on of colonial pain is nothing like a coherent idea. Indeed, the fundamental contradiction of Brexit is that it wants to think of itself simultaneously as a reconstitution of Empire and as an anti-imperial national liberation movement. On the one side, it evokes the idea of a new mercantilist dominion reuniting the old imperial realm as a British-centred trading zone with India, Australia, Canada and indeed African countries all delighted to offer fabulous trade deals to the still-beloved Mother Country, an idea dryly described by sceptical Whitehall officials as ‘Empire 2.0’.21 On the other, it sacralizes 23 June 2016 as, in Nigel Farage’s coinage, Independence Day – a term that hitherto belonged to the ex-colonies: June 2016 as England’s own Easter 1916. Immediately after hailing the day of the Brexit referendum in these terms, Farage added: ‘We’ll have done it without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired.’ The implication, even in the negative, was that the EU was the kind of colonizing power that other countries had typically had to overthrow in wars of independence.
The very title of a key manifesto – Britannia Unchained – evoked images of enslavement. It was published in 2012 by five then-rising stars of the Tory Party, most of whom would end up in cabinet. One of them, Dominic Raab, would in July 2018 become secretary of state for Brexit. Strikingly, the book begins with a dystopian evocation of the London riots of August 2011 – but with a startling insistence on all Britain’s problems being embodied by a young black man, Beau Isagba, who was filmed attacking a young Malaysian student and later jailed: ‘Sadly, Beau Isagba represents the worst of what some elements of Britain have become.’22 The young Tories go on to revive the narrative of post-imperial decline, a weakening of the moral fibre evident in protest: ‘a spirit of decline has returned… Radical political views are gaining support. Agonised navel-gazing is now the fashion, debating the distribution of growth, rather than how to grow the economy as a whole. Hundreds camped in the “Occupy London” protests outside St Paul’s Cathedral in the autumn of 2011.’23 At the heart of this malaise is the rather dimly perceived connection between loss of Empire and the sustainability of the United Kingdom: ‘Britain once ruled the Empire on which the sun never set. Now it can barely keep England and Scotland together.’
In this self-pitying mood, there is final reversal of colonial stereotypes. Under Empire, it was the natives who were lazy, shiftless, slavishly dependent, inherently inclined to criminality. Now, England itself has succumbed to this disease. Deprived of imperial grandeur, John Bull has become Beau Isagba. It is the former colonial subjects who are now what the English once were – striving, disciplined, ambitious – while the English have adopted their old ways: ‘Once they enter the workplace, the British are among the worst idlers in the world. We work among the lowest hours, we retire early and our productivity is poor. Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.’24
How can this reversal, in which the old mother country has become the colonial brat, be itself reversed? By doing what the former colonies did – ‘unchaining’ themselves. In part this is a call to complete the neoliberal project of complete deregulation. Britannia Unchained evokes the piratical buccaneers whose private pursuit of wealth forged the Empire – one chapter is in fact called ‘Buccaneers’ and quotes approvingly from Steve Jobs: ‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.’ The authors grudgingly concede that ‘law and order’ is ‘on the whole beneficial’ but make little effort to conceal that their hearts are with ‘capitalism as chaos’ and the magic that happens in the former colonies when ‘when nearly all society’s strictures are relaxed’.25 Here is the final turning upside-down of Empire. Once, the colonized peoples required the smack of firm British rule because, left to themselves, they were ungovernable. Now it is this very ungovernability that the old mother country must learn from its former subjects. In chaos capitalism, it is not a disease to be cured but a consummation devoutly to be wished. And this consummation can be achieved, not when the old colonies rejoin the Empire, but when the old imperial power rejoins them. British children will be released from their enslavement to welfare dependency only when they become Indian.
What is remarkable, given that the authors will become supporters of Brexit, and in Raab’s case be charged with actually making it happen, is that in this fantasy of a reverse-engineered Empire the EU barely features at all. Britain’s relationship to it is explicitly mentioned just once: ‘Britain is increasingly isolated from the European Union.’26 There is a very vague feeling that Britain, in order to recover the buccaneering spirit of the early Empire, must step outside ‘the cosy European tent’.27 But here again we see the real dynamic of Brexit – the oppressive EU as a necessary invention. The point, even in 2012, is the act of unchaining oneself and in order to be unchained it is necessary to have a master to be unchained from.
This in turn opens up the idea that ‘Empire 2.0’ was really a dream, not just of leaving the EU, but of putting the old white empire back together again in the shape of the Anglo-Saxon Union envisaged by Robert Conquest in 1971 and subsequently reimagined as the Anglosphere. The use of Independence Day as a way of framing Brexit was intended to appeal primarily to Americans, who are familiar with 4th July as their own Independence Day holiday, marking the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. There are, however, two big problems with this neo-imperial project. One is that even the most deluded Brexiteer would concede that even if it were ever to come about, its centre would not be in London but in Washington. It would be an American, not a British empire. George Orwell had long ago anticipated it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where it essentially exists as Oceania. It is not good news for England, which is now called Airstrip One. Even as pure fantasy, which it is, the Anglo-Saxon Union does not set the pulses racing – liberation from a marginal position in one empire to a marginal position in another is not much of a thrill.
Secondly, the imperial idea has little appeal to the working-class English voters who are crucial to Brexit. It is their children who died or who live with PTSD after the fag-end British imperial Anglospheric adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the realities of England becoming a satellite of the US, even if sweetened with delusions of getting the old white imperial gang back together, are, for English workers, even further exposure to the very disruptions of neoliberal globalization from which they are seeking shelter. If the Anglo-Saxon Union comes in the shape of chlorinated chicken and the dismantling of workers’ rights, it doesn’t cut it even as a phantasmagorical spectre.
But there is an even more pressing reason why the idea of Britain as a colony breaking the chains of imperial oppression has far greater urgency than the notion of Britain as the mouse rising once more on the back of the American eagle. Brexit came to the boil in the midst of a wider turmoil of far-right nationalism. And in that stew, a crucialingredient is the transference of victimhood: the claim that white men, rather than being (as they are) relatively privileged, are in fact victims. Victimhood has been seen to be the currency of power – women, people of colour, ethnic minorities appeal for equality by reference to their collective suffering. In this sense, the far-right is the white man’s #MeToo movement. Not only am I not guilty, but I am in fact a victim.
Self-pity is not to be guarded against in this cultural moment – it is the moment. Brexit is about many things but one of them is the feeling that there is a much larger rot to stop, a natural order of things that is being eroded by feminism, multi-culturalism, immigration, globalization and Islam. Emotionally, Brexit is fuelled by anxiety. Asked on the eve of the referendum how EU membership made them feel, voters were given a list of eight words, four positive (happy, hopeful, confident, proud) and four negative (angry, uneasy, disgusted, afraid) and invited to choose up to four of them. Feelings of ‘unease’ dominated, with 44 per cent selecting this word, as against just 26 per cent who went for the most popular positive term, ‘hopeful’. No other positive word was selected by more than 14 per cent. Overall, just 32 per cent chose one or more positive words, while fully 50 per cent chose one or more negative words. Twice as many felt angry as felt happy.28
The great salve to anxiety is the sense of control. The Brexit campaign spoke directly to this need with its brilliant slogan: Take Back Control. But this is exactly what the grand tradition of British heroic failure would never have articulated. There could be no ‘back’ about it. Its fundamental gesture was: I as an English gentleman – and thus by extension we English – am in control. Brexit in this sense has to concede a great deal of psychological ground. It cannot afford the supreme self-confidence of treating triumph and disaster as twin imposters. Where the grand tradition laughs in the face of fear, Brexit had to tap into deep anxiety about the loss of status. It had to somehow put together two fears – the older one about Britain’s loss of status in the world after 1945 and the newer concern that the privileges of whiteness were being eroded.
For people who feel anxious about the threat of losing their status, self-pity is attractive because it combines righteous anger with reassurance. You are reassured because you know you deserve a great deal, righteously angry because for some reason you have not been getting what you so obviously deserve. This combination has always been alluring to anti-colonial liberation movements: we are a great, unique people therefore we deserve to be free; only the colonial oppressor is preventing us from enjoying the freedom we deserve. Brexit steals these clothes. It is a Trading Places movie in which all the complications, disappointments and restrictions of being a former colonial power can be exchanged for the exuberant victimhood of anti-colonial resistance.
Perhaps the strangest expression of this is the desire of mainstream Tory Brexiteers to place themselves in, of all things, the narrative of Irish history. Odd as it is, it has precedents in literature. In the best anatomy of the sadomasochistic psychology of a decadent British ruling class, St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose saga, there is an especially audacious imaginative reversal of history. The Irish nineteenth century was characterized by the catastrophe of the Great Famine of the 1840s, mass eviction of the poorest tenant farmers and their forced emigration to the United States. St Aubyn replays this upside-down – the key event in the novels is the eviction of the English upper-class family from its beloved chateau by the Irish. The manipulative Irish interloper Seamus manages to take over Melrose’s home. He specifically evokes the Famine in explaining his concept of prosperity: ‘“Ultimately, it’s having something to eat when you’re hungry. That’s the prosperity that was denied to Ireland, for instance, during the 1840s…” “Gosh”, said Mary. “There’s not a lot I can do about the Irish in the 1840s.”’ Shortly after this exchange, the conflict comes to a head with the horrible consequence that the Melroses are both turfed out of their chateau and forced to go (for their annual holidays) to America instead: ‘“America”, said Robert. “I want to go to America.” “Why not?” said Patrick. “That’s where Europeans traditionally go when they’ve been evicted.”’29
Equally, in C. J. Sansom’s Dominion, the collaborationist British government, created in London after the surrender at Dunkirk in 1940, deploys the Special Branch Auxiliaries: ‘When they were first created in the 1940s to deal with growing civil unrest, David’s father had said the Auxiliaries reminded him of the Black and Tans, the violent trench veterans recruited by Lloyd George to augment the police during the Irish Independence War. All were armed.’ They are referred to later in the book as ‘the Auxies’, the precise nickname given to the Auxiliaries sent to put down the IRA in Ireland. Conversely, Sansom’s protagonist, David Fitzpatrick, a civil servant secretly working for the British Resistance, is half Irish and has ‘an Irish look’.30 The Irish war of independence is being replayed as the English war of independence against the European invader.
This is, in both senses, quite a seizure. Opposition to Irish independence, even in the anodyne form of Home Rule, is utterly constitutive of modern British conservatism. The full name of the Tory Party is the Conservative and Unionist Party. The unused appendage may now have some resonance in relation to Scottish nationalism, but its origin was in the struggle against Irish efforts to break up the union. This is in the DNA of Toryism: the creation of an independent Ireland was the work of wreckers and fanatics. And now what is the model to which Brexit Britain must look? – the creation of the Irish Free State, which came into being in 1922.
One of the most remarkable features of the Leave campaigns in 2016 was their absolute refusal to countenance any discussion of Ireland. This would become a classic case of the return of the repressed: Ireland would be the step on which the whole Brexit project would stumble. Some of this repression was down to blithe ignorance. To the extent that the Brexiteers thought at all about Ireland, it was to suggest that any problems with the Irish border could be solved by the obvious solution of Ireland rejoining the UK. Nigel Lawson, chairman of the Leave campaign, suggested before the referendum, ‘I would be very happy if the Republic of Ireland – I don’t think it’s going to happen – were to say we made a mistake in getting independence in 1922, and come back within the United Kingdom. That would be great.’31
But in a deeper sense, Ireland did not have to be thought of as a separate problem at all because, post-Brexit, England would be Ireland. As reality gradually took hold in 2018, the less extreme Brexiteers began to imagine that it would be better for Britain to be the Irish Free State. The idea began to surface in Tory circles that it might be okay to accept a circumscribed Brexit and then gradually expand it in the coming decades because this is what the Irish had done after 1922. The pro-Brexit Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan directly compared Theresa May’s Chequers proposals of June 2018 to the approach of the pro-Treaty side in the early years of Irish independence:
When the Irish Free State left the UK, in 1921, there were all sorts of conditions about Treaty ports and oaths of supremacy and residual fiscal payments. And what very quickly became apparent was not just that those things were unenforceable once the split had been realised; it was that everyone in Britain kind of lost interest in enforcing them. And although there were some difficulties along the way in the 1920s, it turned out to have been better to have grabbed what looked like an imperfect independence and then built on it rather than risking the entire process.32
In this vertiginous analogy, in the 1920s and 1930s Britain is the EU and Ireland is, um, Britain. Now, in the post-referendum scenario, the EU is Britain and Britain is Ireland. When the room stops spinning and vision is restored, what can be focused on is the breathtaking nature of the shift in self-image. The British are now the people against whom they themselves once unleashed Oliver Cromwell and the Black and Tans, the gallant indigenous occupants of a conquered and colonized territory rising up, albeit as Nigel Farage boasted, without firing a shot, against their imperial overlords.
For those of us who are Irish it is tempting to take this as a compliment, but it has one minor flaw. Britain was not colonized by the European Union. By no stretch of the imagination – and the elasticity of the Brexit imagination is astonishing – can the relationship between Brussels and London be credibly construed as being similar to anything that occurred in colonial times between London and Dublin, let alone that between London and Delhi or Nairobi. This is Scott-of-the-Azamara-Quest stuff, a hyperbolic inflation of minor inconvenience into epic suffering. As with the Nazi occupation of England, the EU is here playing a pre-scripted role. England needs to think of itself self-pityingly as a colony – therefore it must have a colonizer. If it has been seduced into playing Submissive, somebody has to be playing Dominant.
This has its comic side, but it also has a nasty logic. If there is on the one hand a need to think of oneself as being invaded and colonized and on the other hand no tangible enemy to fulfil this need, the job has to be given to somebody more visibly present. Who is doing the invading? It is the tens of millions of Turks, Iraqis and Syrians who are, in the mendacious pro-Brexit ads, about to head straight for Britain after the imminent accession of Turkey to the EU. Who is doing the colonizing? Those Poles who moved in up the street. What has been transferred once – the guilt of Empire – is free to be transferred again. The old empire appropriates the pain of the subject peoples and then transfers the guilt of invasion and colonization to the immigrant.
It was always possible, in some dark corners of the English imagination, to link ‘the Dunkirk spirit’, via fears and fantasies of ‘invasion’, to hatred of the black people who were ‘colonizing’ the mother country. As the writer of one of the 110,000 supportive letters Enoch Powell received in the fortnight after his ‘rivers of blood’ speech of April 1968 fulminated: ‘I never saw 1 coloured person at Dunkirk and they want to come here and run our little Island what was peaceful and now it is full of MONGREL’S [sic]… I hope you could bring up some of these points in Parliament and better still bring back our FREE SPEECH FOR THE BRITISHER, I MEAN WHITE, AND FREEDOM WHICH WE FOUGHT FOR AT DUNKIRK…’33 Dunkirk was being replayed as a metaphor for white withdrawal from the threat of a multi-cultural society. As Camilla Schofield has put it, ‘The war, and particularly the potent myth of British self-reliance at Dunkirk, served as a means to define who belonged.’34 And this in turn fed a profound connection between the war and a sense of victimhood. A typical letter to Powell said, ‘I’m sure that our boys who died from 1939–1945 to preserve our wonderful country… would turn in their graves if they could see the hordes of invaders we are now getting.’35
The quisling theme was also endemic in the revolt against black and Asian migrants. Immigration was proof that a treacherous elite was selling out the victory of the war. ‘The white working class are redrawn,’ as Schofield writes, ‘as victims of a traitorous state… This was, he insisted, an invasion not unlike that which was threatened in 1940.’36 In Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech, ‘The British people who had fought to protect the nation from a German invasion now faced what Lord Elton had just a few years before called an “unarmed invasion”.’37 Powell in the speech quoted an alleged correspondent: ‘Never in history, she noted, had any but a “conquered people” been settled by such great numbers of aliens.’ It is not hard to see how this strange fusion helps to underpin the mood of Brexit, putting together, as it does, a visceral fear of immigrants with the idea of a heroic retreat from Europe.
‘Invasion’ is thus a structure of feeling that unites the two great neuroses – encompassing the unfinished psychic business of both the Second World War and the end of Empire. Anti-immigration sentiment was originally aimed primarily at Afro-Caribbean and South Asian migrants. In the reactionary imagination they embodied not just the end of Empire but the nightmare of reverse colonization, of the Empire striking back by occupying England’s own streets. These unarmed invaders can be compared to the Nazis who in turn can be compared to the EU, which is equally a form of unarmed invasion. This metaphor does crucial work for Brexit: it fuses the war, the end of Empire, immigration and the EU into a single image.
Yet there is a final twist. Just as the dark fantasy of fighting the Nazis all over again produced a half reality of planning for wartime conditions after Brexit, the hallucination of being a colony ends up with the terror that post-Brexit Britain will actually be a colony. Having talked themselves into the wildly exaggerated notion of Britain as a satrapy of Berlin or a subservient satellite of Brussels, it dawns on the Brexiteers that they are actually creating the very monster they conjured from the depths of the post-imperial imagination. A pre-Brexit Britain cannot reasonably be imagined as a colony, but a post-Brexit Britain can.
The Brexiteers, like some amateurish necromancer, end up recoiling in horror from the spectre they themselves summoned. ‘It is impossible to get any bespoke trade deal in two years or so. And for all that time, the UK would be an EU colony – forced to accept our laws with no say,’ an EU parliament official tells the British press in 2017.38 ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg: UK must not be EU “colony” after Brexit’ blazons the BBC website in December 2017.39 ‘Leaving the EU while remaining in the customs union,’ tweets Daniel Hannan in May 2018, ‘would be far worse than staying where we are. We’d be an EU colony, subject to taxation without representation.’40 ‘In that respect,’ writes Boris Johnson to Theresa May in his letter of resignation as foreign secretary, ‘we are truly headed for the status of colony – and many will struggle to see the economic or political advantages of that particular arrangement.’ When that happens, of course, there will be one last resort: Brexit was not a heroic failure, it was a marvellous success because we always loved the colonies so much that we wanted to be one.
In 2004, on the 150th anniversary of the charge at Balaclava, the Daily Express ran a two-page spread with the glorious headline ‘Triumph of the Light Brigade’. It reported that Terry Brighton, curator of the Queen’s Royal Lancers regimental museum – descendants of the 17th Lancers who were in the vanguard of the charge – ‘rejects the notion that the charge was a failure. Instead he says that it was an amazing success’: ‘The brigade advanced down the valley in perfect formation despite being fired on by cannons to the front and on all sides,’ he said. ‘Many saw comrades to the right and left fall from the saddle and were splattered with the blood of horribly shattered men. Yet they not only reached the Russian guns and took a terrible revenge on the Cossack gunners, they then pursued the Russian cavalry behind the guns. This was not a charge that failed.’41
In 150 years’ time the same, no doubt, will be written of the amazing success of Brexit.