They hate Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn. They no longer trust the BBC. They love civil servants, legal experts and James O’Brien. And now, consumed by the battle against Brexit, hardcore remainers are no longer the moderates
Apparently,they cluster around a hashtag #FBPE (follow back pro-EU -- it was Dutch originally):
...they have grown increasingly despairing. The #FBPE brigade can appear locked in an arms race to out-remain each other. The descriptions that accompany their profiles are furnished with Brexiter slurs they’ve reappropriated (“remoaner”, “saboteur”), lists of the European countries they’ve lived in, and plainspoken declarations of devotion (“Remain – all the way through like a stick of rock”)...for this online tribe, #FBPE is more than a badge of solidarity – it has given them an identity....anything less than staying in Europe will devastate them. “It’s going to be like a bereavement for me,” says Helen Harris-Burland, a campaigner from the Chilterns.
Solidarity can be increased culturally:
remainists can read The New European, a pro-EU newspaper, and anti-Brexit novels by Ali Smith and Jonathan Coe. They can listen to podcasts like My Parents Voted Brexit and Remainiacs, and if they’re looking for some remain-themed music, they can put on a recent album by The Matthew Herbert Brexit Big Band, which includes samples of Gibraltarian monkeys, a swimmer crossing the Channel and a Ford Fiesta being scrapped.
There is victimhood:
remainists have found themselves out in the cold. “I just felt everything I believed in was stolen from me,”...Remainists feel embattled, ignored; they lament what their country has become. They feel that the politicians who are meant to be on their side, and the media organisations that are meant to present facts impartially, have betrayed them.... “Europeanism has always been more anti-Eurosceptic than pro-European,”[staggeringly]... “Unfortunately, the BBC is no longer a source of truth for what’s going on in the country.”...Twitter has filled that void.... a space for like-minded souls to furiously agree with each other and rage at the other side’s idiocy,...
And class -- upwards:
Adonis defines remainism as a revolt of the middle class – and that is why he believes that, in the end, Brexit won’t happen. “The English middle class, deeply alarmed, will be heard and will win,” he told me....Remainism is seen, not entirely unfairly, as an unusually middle-class protest movement, but remainists have attempted to flip that perception by branding Brexiters, or at least the politicians who speak on their behalf, as the true elite.
And downwards:
their Brexiter critics still accuse them of looking down on leave supporters. And it’s true that derision does sometimes rise to the surface...remainists wielded signs that mocked leavers while trumpeting their own superiority: “52% Pride and Prejudice 48% Sense and Sensibility,” read one.
Working together, these factors mean:
these people, who once dismissed radicals as unreasonable, have themselves become radicalised. They used to pride themselves on their moderation; now, spurred on by rage, they divide the world into enemies and allies. What they are doing is loud, obsessive, tribal, confrontational – politics, in other words....“It was just so reminiscent of how radical-right voters would think,...for remainists, just like leavers, the argument is really about Britain: the country they thought they were living in, and the country they want it to be.
They go on protests. They have strong opinions about Guy Verhofstadt and Sabine Weyand. They worry about chlorinated chicken. They have acquired detailed knowledge of electoral law and can list the leave campaign’s violations. They light up at any mention of the 2012 Olympics. They wonder what Orwell would have made of all this. They hang the EU flag in their windows. (There is a group of remainists who call themselves EU Flag Mafia, and perform stunts such as hanging dozens of flags from poles in the sea off Southend, like a gang of centrist situationists.)...Wooferendum, even mobilises dogs against Brexit. [There are also] naffer edges of remainism, they include the kind of love songs or break-up ballads one might hear at an open-mic night, but addressed to the EU
The Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole has described Brexit as a masochistic project but, as leavers are fond of pointing out, remainists have a masochistic streak of their own. The most zealous remainists give the impression of relishing each morsel of bad news – growth slowing, a car plant closing – as if willing on the damage that confirms their worst fears. Like revolutionaries striving to heighten the contradictions, they believe that only then will leave voters see the error of their ways, and the politicians who deceived them get what they deserve.
There is the small c conservatism and Oedipal hangups:
Remainists tend to put their faith not in politicians, but in bureaucrats and civil servants....Remainists wish these kinds of “grownups” – seemingly responsible, competent people, capable of putting the national interest above ambition and petty rivalries – could clean up the mess...Remainists look enviously at Europe, longing for a leader of their own – a Merkel, a Macron, a Tusk – to deliver Britain from Brexit....Expertise matters to remainists. They don’t merely admire it – that admiration is an important part of how they define themselves...Behind this solemn reverence for experts lies the belief, or at least the forlorn hope, that if leavers were only forced to confront the facts on Brexit, they would be overwhelmed by the weight of evidence....remainists worship[James o'Brien of LBC] for the way he shreds leavers’ arguments....figures from outside party politics filled the void. Most prominent was Gina Miller
Much as remainists claim to champion complexity, their own optimism is not so different from the kind currently coming out of No 10: it is as if the past three years could be magicked away, Brexit and its supporters bypassed, at little enduring cost.
[Despite the dogma that] the young symbolise the future of the country...[there] lies a more old-fashioned worldview. It’s leavers who are typically accused of indulging imperial nostalgia, by insisting that Brexit will revive Britain’s bygone greatness. But you can find that same nostalgia in remainists’ fear that leaving the EU will finish off whatever greatness remains....Some of this same nostalgia seems to inform the familiar lament about how far Britain has fallen, reducing itself to a laughing stock on the world stage.
Fancy the Graun printing this! They need lots of reader contributions in the silly season?
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