BY SEAN WALSH
I voted for Brexit because it seemed to me that the Russian bots who were trying to persuade us to leave the EU had better arguments than the UK officials who were cajoling us to stay. I judge these things on merit.
I have seen nothing that has changed my mind. And one of those things I haven’t seen is Brexit, probably because it never happened.
What has happened reminds me of what happens the first time you ask your teenager to make you a cup of tea and he screws it up very deliberately, his intention being to make you wish you’d never asked him in the first place.
In 2016 we asked for some Earl Grey or at the very least a strong English Breakfast blend and a resentful Establishment class half boiled the kettle, waved a tea bag at the tepid liquid, put in too much milk, and handed it to you in a glass while insisting that this is what you asked for and that you were warned.
And now the newish, unelected “prime minister”, as part of his coup management, is hinting that the public is fed up with this slop and all options must be considered including a return to the ghastly latte we were all forced to drink before. Even though it’s way more expensive and bitter than it used to be. And we were just getting used to the luke warm “tea”.
There is, in short, no such thing as Brexit outside of the instructions handed to the British State to provide one, instructions which have not so much been ignored as rewritten. It’s dumb and dishonest to blame Brexit for the awful state of things, economic and cultural. It makes as much sense as blaming your upset stomach on the food you ordered but which never arrived.
Here endeth the mixing of metaphors. For now.
A couple of bitter, unelected remoaners
Many of us who voted to leave the EU did so, I suspect, for two reasons – one negative, the other positive. We hate the asphyxiating regulation fetishism of the EU, and we love the idea of the nation state in general and of Britain in particular.
In a pamphlet called England and the Need for Nations Roger Scruton defends the nation state as the object of a spontaneous and extra-rational affection of people who share a common territory. It is the idea of the nation which logically precedes any question of how a people would choose to be governed. Before we can choose how we wish to be governed there must be some way of saying who we are.
Just as important, he argues, it is the nation state which guarantees a space in which political disagreements become secondary to more durable types of attachment than should be attached to political parties.
National affection, a quiet fondness for the eccentricities and history of one’s own country, provides the space which makes political disagreement tolerable. Politicians who hate the national idea want us to hate each other.
Although it pretends otherwise, the whole point of the EU is to replace the nation state with satellite jurisdictions whose antecedent cultures, histories and legal traditions are gradually eroded by uniform regulatory onslaught.
The EU acts like a father with many children who is indifferent to, or even annoyed by, the fact that they are very different, and becomes like an autocrat as a result.
These were the reasons I sided with the Russian bots in 2016, and even if they are no good and even if my overall argument is not valid, they are as they are and nothing that the Rejoiners are saying now has any relevance to them whatsoever.
The case for Brexit –which is to say specifically British exit from the EU machine- is unique in any case because of our legal culture which is shaped by sensitivity to precedent and the idea that the law –or much of it- is something that emerges from real cases. It is not, as it is in the European tradition, something that moves from abstract principle downwards. It goes the other way.
The Common Law is almost the most beautiful piece of intellectual architecture in human history. And the next time someone asks you that tiresome question “what is Britishness?” you can just point to it and tell them that it’s right there, written up as the record of disputes and resolutions between the strangest people on the planet.
And if that’s not good enough for them then you can add that just because something is not definable it doesn’t follow that it is mere fiction. Some things are beyond definition because they are closer to God.
These, then, are some of the reasons I voted for Brexit. Buses, or what was written on them, didn’t get much of my attention.