Ditch the luvvies?

Not many gripping ideological developments -- the options seem to have run out -- but a busy week for politicians wheeling and dealing to compromise over the Irish border question, with kites flying daily -- will May ditch the DUP? Will she propose an indefinite extension of the transition process in order to postpone having to implement a backstop which would split the UK and NI? The Graun seems to relish this latter prospect for winding up the Brexiteers All this together with an important article on whether the new trend will be for men to wear makeup -- business as usual for  the Graudian.

Some hints of desperation too in a couple of articles. I Jack uses the old dodge of taking a contemporary story to bang on about Brexit:

Like Banksy’s artwork, the United Kingdom is shredding itself in public 

Actually, the article is an odd piece for a Grduniasta -- Brexiteers are not patriotic enough for Jack. In particular, they don't seem to care for the Union any more. This is threatening the cosy view of a United Kingdom that Jack remembers from his childhood,complete with memories of steam trains and the coronation.There's a bit of smearing (maybe deserved) of the DUP as fanatical Presbyterians and Orangemen. Then of the Brexiteers who will risk the Union to get Brexit. The fanatical traitors! Worse, they are not necessarily in the minority:

Polls conducted in June for the universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff – the latest in a series known as the Future of England Study – show, to quote this week’s press release, that “self-professed unionists, most notably leave-voting Conservatives, were largely unconcerned about the risks to the union posed by Brexit”. ..If the price of Brexit was Scottish independence, 77% of English Conservatives would be willing to pay it. If the price was the collapse of Northern Ireland’s peace process, 73% of them would likewise be content; among leave voters in Northern Ireland, who are overwhelmingly unionist, that figure rose to 87% 

Poor Jack concludes that: 'Meaning is certainly hard to find.'

The bafflement of Remainers is revealed in another comment piece, this time by J Harris In advance of some celeb promotion of a new march for a People's Vote, in London it goes without saying:

Millions – including me – will instantly agree with what its cast have to say...But, God, there is a problem here... [it] shines light on an increasingly inescapable problem: the failure of the range of forces now pushing against Brexit (from Open Britain, to Scientists for EU and the student campaign FFS (AKA For our Future’s Sake), and Britain for Europe) to do much more than working up their own side, and get anywhere near shifting the balance of opinion in the country...Clearly, Brexit remains a terrible idea...[but]... the public continues to be as split on the issue as it was two years ago, and the huge constituency of leave supporters who wonder why we haven’t left already far outweighs the number of repentant Brexiters who would now back staying in the EU.

Harris says:

[Remain campaigners] cannot seem to break out of the stereotype of remain voters as metropolitan and largely middle class, nor push beyond the impression of the anti-Brexit cause as something led by representatives of some awful ancien regime, commanded by Tony Blair, Nick Clegg and Bob Geldof (with supporting roles for, say, the former minister Andrew Adonis and the philosopher AC Graying, both of whom perhaps ought to tweet less)...you run the risk of simply reminding millions of people why they voted to exit the EU in the first place.

Instead:

it is high time they changed tack. So: ditch the celebs and faded politicians. Be seen pitching up in the places that voted leave, and finally listening. Find everyday voices with a clear sense of the nitty-gritty calamities that await.  

Luckily, the prescient and 'venerable' G Miller spotted this at an earlier march:  '“It’s time we took things back to the streets and the lanes, the towns and the villages, the meadows and the squares of this country,” she said. So why haven’t they done it?'

Well the answer might be interesting -- Remain enthusiasm is confined to the new petit bourgeois bystrong class ties. Their cultural interests are symbolised in a rather empty way, by 'Europe' (and by other moral panics too, of course). Their cultural conservatism makes them long for a time when Blair and Clegg were always on the telly, and Geldof chugged for the starving in an acceptable way. They have no interest in actually talking to anyone else. The non-metropolitan population are there only as raw material for social distancing -- as Bourdieu found with taste generally, what the ordinary people are assumed to want has to be reversed to claim distinction. The Brexit campaign seems to have mobilised those who now know how to do cultural politics right back.