BY SEAN WALSH
The late Michael Wharton was the genius behind the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column. Therein he created a dystopian hellhole, fantasy when he wrote it, inhabited by a collection of ghastly Leftist caricatures (or at least they were at the time). This was all very prescient pre-lanyard cultural anticipation, and Wharton was smart enough to die before it all happened.
The most familiar of his creations is Mrs Dutt-Pauker, the “immensely rich and privileged Hampstead socialist” and admirer of miscellaneous Soviet and East European commie tyrants from Stalin down.
Some years ago, the preternaturally snobbish Dutt-Pauker decided that if incarnation was good enough for God, then it is certainly good enough for her, and so migrated to the Real World and changed her name to (among others) Emily Thornberry.
Thornberry’s most recent contribution to the mental wellbeing of the nation is her suggestion that we rejoin the European Union via the legitimising mechanism of a manifesto commitment — the referendum route having been tried and found wanting, presumably.
Mrs Thornberry, to be fair, has a certain and very rare honesty for a politician. It is the straightforwardness that comes from being rich enough to be inoculated against policies she’s happy to impose on the oiks.
So, when it was put to her that this approach would not be popular with, let’s just think of a number, say 17.4 million of her less exalted fellow citizens, she had this to say: “they can get over it”.
Thornberry is the boxier and perhaps thirstier Marie Antoinette de nos jours: “Let me eat cake! And pour me another Chateau Lafite Rothschild! And you’re paying.”
To be fair, it shows a certain political cunning to suggest that an unpopular policy be included in an election manifesto. That’s exactly where you’d put it if you were keen to make sure it’d go completely unnoticed. It is not the done thing to read one of these things.
If, for example, you had a pre-season leaked list of who is a Traitor and who is Faithful, and you wanted to keep it secret from the public, then a party manifesto is exactly where you’d choose to put it for safe keeping.
It is rumoured that the Labour 1983 collection of policy proposals, the “longest suicide note in history”, contains a list of who is a goat and who is a sheep, which Jesus put in there as a bit of a joke when he knew nobody was looking.
To put it another way, the manifesto “commitment” is part of what Wittgenstein might have called the “language game” of British elections. It is essential that commitments are made, but it is also essential that they are not taken seriously.
This is all part of the uniqueness of the British democratic tradition — those things said while campaigning express nothing more than vague wishes, and we really shouldn’t take the whole thing so seriously.
I suppose that those of us who voted Leave are just going to have to accept that for some on the Left the case for EU membership is like the Gnostic heresy in the Catholic church, or Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction, and that no matter how often you think you’ve dealt with it, it always finds a way of jolting itself back to life.
Argument doesn’t seem to help. You can point out that even if it’s true that the EU is our largest trading block, it doesn’t follow that we should be part of it. The opposite, in fact. For A to trade with B, there must be two things, A and B. And if B just folds itself into A, then that’s not a consolidation of an economic relationship. That’s being swallowed alive.
You don’t have to admire their dress sense or share their fondness for ballet to agree that the Russian bots were right about that. But people like Thornberry or the nepo-archetype Stephen Kinnock can never get this because they have not so much a position as a condition, and in such cases, it is not argument but therapy that is needed.
The European project, with its process obsession and default regulatory overreach, is left-hemisphere political thinking, and its imposition on the British way of thinking, with its quirky right-hemisphere emphasis, was never likely to work out for anyone.
As I’ve argued before, there is such a thing as national character, and while it is true that this is difficult to define, that is a difficulty it has in common with most things that have value in themselves.
But the EU is set up in a way that will never allow it to get this. It is an attempt to grow a country out of a set of rules, rather than to let the rules emerge from a shared sense of national affection. It is an inversion of God’s way of bringing things about.
Anyway, we can finally put to bed this nonsense about the mischievous Russian bots somehow being dispositive in the 2016 to-and-fro. Because those algorithms missed the best argument for stepping away from the European asphyxiation: that it would, all these years later, fuck with the heads of the Emily Thornberrys of this world.
This is the first in a series of Left-Wing Twat (LWT) articles. With the unelected socialist wingnut in Number 10, Labour infighting on the rise, the economy in tatters, student union MPs out in full force, and even Blair’s former advisers despairing at the government’s self-immolating economic stance, Country Squire Magazine hopes to highlight as many of these Fabian Titanic deckchair-rearrangers as possible before they are despatched into the quango wilderness for another generation. Recommendations welcomed.