Whereas (for example) AA Gill identified nostalgia as the cause of Brexit (see below) Fintan identifies self-pity as the principle emotion behind it. I don't quite see this in my own feelings, but then I'm a remainiac/remoaner. I am of an age (63) where most of the films on the television when I was young were Westerns or War films, nearly all the war films being about WW2. As a boy I made Airfix models including the ubiquitous Spitfire and Lancaster which hung from my bedroom ceiling for many years. I was a CCF cadet and played wargames but I didn't fall for the idea that the rest of Europe resented our history. Perhaps working in small businesses and reading Will Hutton's The State We're In amongst much else ensured that I was well aware (as Alex Boris Johnson certainly was) that Britain's ills were principally our own fault.
Anyway, Fintan argues well and supports his arguments with so many references to English culture that I had long forgotten.
Most topically, he includes a discussion on how 'camp' is the rhetoric of Mr Alex Boris Johnson.
It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so
familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop,
outside every school in every parish council in the country.
Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up,
with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of
hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed
in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my
country back.”
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience
erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back
from where?”
Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies.
Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We
all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back
from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back,
back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church
bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter
and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart
jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper
weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria
sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a
yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados,
back to deference and respect, to make do and
mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence
and patronising foreigners with pity.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line
of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia.
The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond
belief that everything was better back then,
that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some
foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the
knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can
build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian
country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful
as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow
as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no
politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching
than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as
great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.
The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new,
energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled
inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope
for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners
and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory
island of moaning and pomposity.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then
just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and
entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great
engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all
the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s
eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird
with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert
Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.
All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless
Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and
reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of
Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s
and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to
be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will
sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being
called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume
hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.
There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are
old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young
aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the
stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the
EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.
The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them.
They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most
outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”.
Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness
— well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and
gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re
coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on
Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter
Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand
dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call
centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has
both capitals and little letters and numbers and
more than eight digits.
Brexit is the fond belief that Britain is worse now than at some point in the foggy past where we achieved peak Blighty
We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to
make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what
they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can
still have sex with your ex. They reckon they
can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the
kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict
with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend
and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into
Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking
nice today. Would you like some?”
When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply,
with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us,
honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of
Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers,
they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want
to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the
decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going
to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would
be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of
poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling
personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey
to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us. The
tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and
vengeful, because divorces always are and, just
in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so
badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t
notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the
first place.
Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’
You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has
gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to
make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is
something only politicians care about; it makes not
a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of
strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of
strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters
is that we have as many judges as possible on the
side of personal freedom.
Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me
feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and
balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have
too many wise heads and different opinions. If
you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a
European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own
rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape
may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your
and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.
The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The
first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the
week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t
been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud
to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality,
the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this
culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our
continent and completely understand the images
and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have
been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient
Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century
France, and I don’t need the context or the
landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its
instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance,
the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque,
neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism,
fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all
European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.
There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and
the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture,
without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle,
profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was
ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my
day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been
enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat,
the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around
the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests,
expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and
exciting.
The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.
Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators,
producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t
dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages
it and you can truncate it. You can make it
harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build
walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden
civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made
everything we have and everything we are, why
would you not want to be part of it?
I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library
ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it?
In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits.
Look at them, too frightened to join in."
