The real dilemma -- how are we supposed to FEEL?*

Good old Graun! It had the customary April Fool's joke -- this time about a new 'healing Tsar' to bring us together after Brexit. Then apparently not joking articles on the dreadful pains they have all been feeling lately. Best of which includes J Harris

First up some classic toff hatred:

my own peak of anger about Brexit and its absurdities arrived last Wednesday. Jacob Rees-Mogg was in the Commons chamber, making quips about the fact that another Conservative MP had been to Winchester rather than Eton...[then]...the spectacle of Iain Duncan Smith arriving at Chequers in an open-topped vintage sports car. Meanwhile, there were reports of Theresa May’s address to Conservative MPs being made all the more dramatic by the sound of her voice cracking: something conspicuously absent when she has talked about everything from the Grenfell Tower disaster to her role in the Windrush tragedy, but there we are.

It must be emotions in the tight place! For Harris:

the impossibility of leaving the EU without truly dire economic and social damage is self-evident....Anger might seem like the most apposite response [for Guadrina liberals?] , but what we have mostly seen is a strange passivity....Even on the march for a second referendum a week ago, the now-customary humour captured on the placards and banners too often seemed to capture a certain weariness, and the expectation of defeat: “If EU leave me now, EU’ll take away the biggest part of me”; “Think about the halloumi prices”; “I’m not one to make a fuss but the past couple of years have been, quite frankly, farcical”....I was in a party of five, and we all awkwardly joined in. But ... How exactly were we actually meant to feel?

I think he fails to get the point that it is displaying the wit and humour that is the main purpose of the march. It is signalling not only virtue but cultural capital too. I don't think the political point of the march matters -- was it about a second vote or revocation? Both of those offer symbolic not real politics anyway,deferring the question of what the EU is actually for. The march next year will be about climate change or plastic pollution. It is the middle class version of attending a football match in your colours, as Parkin pointed out long ago with CND marchers.

There is a book Harris has been reading:

the ingrained aspects of national identity [just one?] pointed out by the social anthropologist Kate Fox. In her classic book Watching the English, she writes about the deep layers of performance and self-mockery that smother even heartfelt misery and anger: “Even if you are feeling desperate, you must pretend to be only pretending to feel desperate.” More generally, she talks about “perverse obliqueness”, “emotional constipation” and a “general inability to engage in a direct and straightforward fashion with other human beings”...

The Tories manipulated all this:

Thirty years on, we face the final completion of a Tory project started back then, and the recasting of Britain – or, rather England – as a crabby, racist, inward-looking hole, and to what response? Jokes, mutterings, clicks, sporadic Twitterstorms, but nothing remotely comparable....Forty years of post-Thatcher individualism have done their work, so that protest is now not a matter of collective agency (in other words, “we can stop this”), but the kind of atomised conscience-salving [Well done -- now you're getting there!] I first glimpsed at the time of the Iraq war, with the appearance of that deathly slogan “Not in my name”.

Then the classic Guardina line on the need for more (but proper) emotions

It is part of the tragedy of Brexit that the opportunists now pushing the country towards disaster have not only been better at making their case with big stories and emotional oomph, but have not been convincingly challenged on that terrain. ...there might be something in the example set by Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League, and a bold, popular, singularly un-English approach memorably summed up by one of its activists: “For a while we managed to create, in our noisy, messy, unconventional way, an emotional alternative to nationalism and patriotism, a celebration of a different kind of pride and solidarity.”...by the time our passions finally start stirring, it is likely to be far, far too late.

Virtually an advocacy of street riots!