Away with fantasy...*

So May has gone for it and signed up to Chequers in all but name,and, predictably, produced a revolt by Brexiteers and Remainers. The controversial clauses turn on the backstop and how it will provide for the UK remaining in the Customs Union with no ability to leave. I am dismayed (sic) more by the ways in which the whole 2 years have focused on the withdrawal agreement and not on the trade deal which we were promised -- that will occupy the next two years and the problem is that the EC can then delay that, forcing the backstop to apply for ever. Meanwhile what is being called the 'divorce bill' again will be at least £39bn...

The Times has a comment piece by P Collins (behind its subscription wall) developing a line that was sketched yesterday by the BBC. Brexit was never going to work in the real world.Brexiteers were ridiculous idealists to think it would. Makes a change from being ignorant racists I suppose,but a clear claim for the superior commonsense (and hindsight) of the professional middle class journalist, for pragmatism rather than howling contempt for the elderly or proletarian. We need to be brought together by Daddy standing for the Law rather than childish fantasy (or phantasy).Two other themes have been prominent:

• Brexiteers have come up with no alternative. The oft-mentioned Canada plus or no deal do not count as alternatives because they will never get through Parliament -- of course, probably neither will Chequers.

• No deal,'crashing out' or ' disorderly Brexit', in particular will be catastrophic,and there are predictions of a new Project Fear on steroids. May thinks she now has no need to prepare for no deal, of course.

I examined the Collins piece for my interest in what makes Remainers want to remain. In this case it was: 'As a risk-averse voter, I cast my ballot for Remain, not out of love for the unlovable EU but because the status quo is better than change, as we now know to be true'. Again , quite a different take on the view that only Brexiteers are conservatives. 

Collins also has some fears and anxieties about a People's Vote:

I have been, until now, opposed to a second referendum. The impact of leaving was, and still is, vastly exaggerated by the Remain side. Leaving would be detrimental but the sky won’t cave in. I feared taking the verdict of the people in vain and I am wary of the cynicism that will accompany a repeat of the vote. It is also probable that a second vote will then prompt a Tory manifesto demand for a third. Unless, of course, Leave wins again and dumps us back into the impasse, which is entirely possible.

I think this is the framework for the emerging liberal worldview. We must NEVER have disorder, so 'no deal' is to be banished as unthinkable. That leaves Chequers or PV. Maybe PV will be a threatened alternative if Chequers is rejected, which is what May herself seemed to imply. PV still remains the choice for C4 news, but liberal upholders of the status quo seem to be rallying behind Chequers,maybe to avoid disorder again. This might be combined with playing the EC long game -- delaying March 29th.

So to the Guardian.

There is quite a reasonable analysis of the options which include a May Parliamentary win, a general election or a PV, with suitable caution about all of them.

There is also a tedious 'long read' by F O'Toole on the line about Brexit as a paranoid fantasy. Strangely, most of it seems to be about the 1975 campaign to join the EEC. This may be because O'Toole has a book out and this is an edited extract from it. Could have brought it up to date but,itmust have taken simply ages to hone it. O'Toole operates beneath mere conscious argument to locate:

...a deeper structure of feeling [literary liberals love them -- saves all that pedantic stuff about evidence and only nice sensitive people can uncover them]  in England. One is the fear of the Englishman turning into the “new European”, fitting himself into the structures of German domination [a Len Deighton novel and TV serialization is the evidence here]...building on real historical memories [can't be many real rememberers left?] of the appeasers...This idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew [nothing rational] of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves...[Then]...the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers... German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war....[novelists like Deighton and R Harris expressed]...profound national anxieties...in the English reactionary imagination, dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality....[where do you start with this?]... Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project [apparently Johnson implied this]...[Thatcher also had]... fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. [Not a bad assessment]

Let's deal with some evidence now. O'Toole lives in Ireland, I gather,so he has no vox pops from small traders in midlands markets to relate. We may have to manage evidence, of course, if it seems to disagree with us:

...In 1990, while Germany was being reunified, there was very little depth to anti-German feeling in Britain – surveys at the time showed that most British people were in favour of German unity and trusted the Germans a lot or somewhat. The imagining of a German-dominated Europe through the evocation of Hitler was not an authentic popular prejudice against an old enemy. It was a way – albeit one that still seemed to have few real-world consequences – of thinking about the European Union itself...[We have imperialism and racism demonstrated in the Falklands War]  The Falklands was a kind of make-believe England with no black and brown immigrants

Before we go any further, the idea of a treacherous elite seems to me to be very well grounded not just in appeasement but in most current British history. And German economic domination has been supported in The Left Case Against the EU, written by an economist not a racist paranoid. .Only a fiendish set of nasty right wing manipulators could have brought this off this fantasy, which is not even authentic -- and sold it to 17m voters.

Back to O'Toole, with more amateur Freudianism:

The war imagery filled a hole. England had no deep imaginative commitment to the European project. As an idea, the EU had a distinctly weak grip on English allegiance...[Iwonder why?]...The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975 [a long section this -- O'Toole wants to revisit 1975 -- for 'lessons' no doubt]  many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters [quite unlike the millenials shrieking for a PV]...[In 1975's]... hysterical rhetoric the outlines of two notions that would become crucial to Brexit discourse. One is the comparison of pro-European Brits to quislings, collaborators, appeasers and traitors....[and weirdest of all]...the other idea is the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom...Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted.

Then there is 

The lure of self-pity, the weird need to dream England into a state of awful oppression [and, more amateur Freud] The new German invasion, cloaked in the guise of peaceful cooperation, is more damnable because it does not give the English Resistance a proper physical target. Hostility to the EU thus opens the way to a bizarre logic in which a Nazi invasion would have been, relatively speaking, welcome. This is a deeply strange kind of displacement – a victor learning to think like the vanquished. But it makes a kind of sense.[he has read abit abot proejcetion too] ...the proto-Brexiteers came up with a counter-factual truth that was at the same time highly satisfying: they hate us because we saved them. [1975 shows us]a masochistic rhetoric that would return in full force as the Brexit negotiations failed to produce the promised miracles.

Well-- long and tedious but also quite revealing. Let's do amateur Freud right back and see all this as a symptom of Irish remainer feeling. Everything is explained as the result of war, anti-German feeling, racism and the jackboot of English imperialism. Evidence is found typically in novels and TV plays as representing structures of feeling. Leaver voters are never actually consulted but have their lines provided for them: remainers know better than they do what they are really thinking. The only problem for the EU was that it failed to attract the right sort of feelings from the Brits. Vicious, fantasist, masochistic and paranoid feelings drove Brexit.

We could even be more amateur Freudian than O'Toole in suggesting that all this is a projection, a mirror image of remainers fears and hatreds which can never be expressed openly but have to be coded. It is vicious hatred of the British, of the military campaign against Irish nationalists, of the mob, of silver-tongued demagogues. Of self-pity and a sense of oppression and martyrdom, typical of the new left, rejected both by the ignorant mob and by contemptuous upper class English barbarians. Of a search for a forgiving Father to make it all safe again and stop the nastiness.