Ash Sarkar
Contributing editor, Novara Media
Under a Conservative majority, Brexit is a mandate for nationalism, authoritarianism and redrawing the boundaries of Britishness along increasingly nativist lines. Before we can even think about the next election, we have to survive four years of culture war first.”
Anna Soubry
Former Tory MP who left the party over Brexit and helped to form Change UK
on the family WhatsApp group our four daughters aged 28-33 were exchanging horrified posts of photos of an older generation celebrating the theft of their future.
Timberlake Wertenbaker
Playwright, author of Our Country’s Good and adapter of Elena Ferrante for radio
“I was supposed to go out and recite some work in foreign language with friends, but I couldn’t face it. So I read some letters at home by two Basque women who were travelling through Europe. It was helpful because the idea of a multilingual culture I feel is what the domineering Faragist movement doesn’t seem to like. I felt desperate, but I am rebelling in my work by translating an Italian play by Ugo Betti. It worries me that we are having fewer European plays put on. We’ve already had a cultural Brexit in a way and languages are not being so widely taught in schools. It is so sad.”
Femi Oluwole
Co-founder of the pro-EU group Our Future, Our Choice
Chaos is coming, it’s that simple. I’ve spent four years trying to avoid it, but it is coming.”
Observer editorial:
we can go for a bare-bones agreement of the sort Johnson will outline in a speech tomorrow, along with a set of churlish demands for the next stage of negotiations.... a Canada-style free-trade deal of the kind the prime minister will champion in his speech will widen regional inequalities, already among the highest in Europe. Worst of all, it undermines the Good Friday agreement, which created a fragile peace in Northern Ireland that was predicated on both Ireland and the UK being part of the single market and customs union.
[Johnson] will no doubt take last year’s election result as an endorsement of the effectiveness of his political strategy: putting out untrue claims about his opponents, blaming them for events that happened on his party’s watch, and avoiding scrutiny from parliament and the media.
...we have not left Europe. Britons will continue to holiday on the continent, to work and study there, to fall in love there.[I thought all that had been ruled out now see Agony Aunt for Remain below, October 2019] ...We can hold on to the knowledge that our ties of history and culture, of hearts and kinship, cannot be severed with a tawdry light show, a smirking boast and a toast. They are vital bonds that, with tending, will endure and, we hope, one day, with good grace and rediscovered wisdom, will be reinvigorated to the benefit of us all.[But what has that got to do with the EC?]Another correspondent evidently set out to look for boomers being racist:
I’d had a pint in the Wetherspoon’s on Whitehall the night before. The pub had hosted the most raucous of “Ingerlund” crowds, [did he see this for himself?] getting tanked up before swaying down past the cenotaph to hear the nation’s landlord, Tim Martin, offer his back-of-a-fag-packet take on global geopolitics [but was there any thrilling racism to report as you drank your small Vichy water?] .Johnson was disappointing though:
In place of a convincing vision of Britain’s “global future”, there had been a desperate-sounding hope that we should just all try to forgive and forget the recent past...the harangues of the past three years seemed to be expressed in a curious silence. College Green had emptied of TV crews; there was not a protest vigil or a megaphone shouter in sight [what a marvellous relief!].Finally, and to his relief
I was met first by a big bloke in a union jack T-shirt amplifying God Save the Queen through a bullhorn and challenging me to prove myself a patriot by joining in. [still no racism or threats though?]...The emphasis, on this “happy Brexit day”, appeared to lie on keeping any extremes of anger contained; there were no fireworks, no cans of alcohol, and the crowd was reminded that swearing was a public order offence [how disappointing]
It would be tempting to believe that Farage and those footsoldiers – who variously embraced at 11pm or yelled “Fuck the EU” [was he there?] – have been appeased by the victory and that a new, one-nation vision might emerge [ a bit like Johnson had said, but not 'desperate-sounding'?.
I McEwan,the novelist and convicted Scot offers some value. It is a curious piece, apparently requiring to be updated to avoid error -- updated from 2016 by the look of it
the most pointless, masochistic ambition ever dreamed of in the history of these islands...Not his absurd tirade pissing into the wind and unable to let go, but Brexit. His side is still right, of course:
A majority voted in December for parties which supported a second referendum [we do not know that was their main reason, of course]. But those parties failed lamentably to make common cause....Set aside for a moment Vote Leave’s lies, dodgy funding, Russian involvement or the toothless Electoral Commission. Consider instead the magic dust. How did a matter of such momentous constitutional, economic and cultural consequence come to be settled by a first-past-the-post vote and not by a super-majority? [Have we ever had that before?]
...our prolonged parliamentary chaos derived from an ill-posed yes-no question to which there were a score of answers [not from mischief making by Remainers] ; that the long-evolved ecology of the EU has profoundly shaped the flora of our nation’s landscape and to rip these plants out will be brutal [bit vague] ; that what was once called a hard Brexit became soft by contrast with the threatened no-deal that even now persists [by the EU?]; that any mode of departure, by the government’s own estimate, will shrink the economy [relatively]; that we have a gift for multiple and bitter division – young against old, cities against the country, graduates against early school-leavers, Scotland and Northern Ireland against England and Wales [who was responsible for that though?] ; that all past, present and future international trade deals or treaties are a compromise with sovereignty, as is our signature on the Paris accords, or our membership of Nato, and that therefore “Take Back Control” was the emptiest, most cynical promise of this sorry season.[He still can't see the difference between negotiated compromises subject to electoral mandate and anonymous bureaucratic rulings informed by neoliberalism, however unpopular]
There is much that is historically unjust about the British state, but very little of that injustice derives from the EU [He can't see the systemic issues and constraints behind actual policies]. ...Hedge fund owners, plutocrat donors to the cause, Etonians and newspaper proprietors cast themselves as enemies of the elite. [new petite bourgeoisie punching up] More magic dust...We have witnessed reasoned argument’s fall from grace [oh dear] . The Brexit impulse had strong elements of blood-and-soil, with hints of Empire nostalgia. Such spooky longings floated high above mere facts. [Punching down now -- he knows all this --how?]
We sense [that's how he knows! ] damage and diminishment ahead. In a dangerous world crowded with loud-mouthed “strongmen”, the EU was our best hope for an open, tolerant, free [!] and peaceful [!] community of [European] nations
The remainers held out for a kinder sort of world [except for racist Leavers?] , but we were always the herbivores in this debate, with our enormous, good-natured and derided marches – “a hate-filled crowd”, the Sun; “an elite”, the Daily Telegraph. [No hate-filled Guardina columns? No Toynbee {see Polly pecks at old people, Jan 2019}? no Soubry WhatsApp posts as above?]What was it PG Wodehouse said about the difference between a Scot with a grievance and a ray of sunshine? McEwan might still make a few bob with his Brexit novel [Cockroach] . I haven't read it yet* but I bet it's full of open, tolerant, enormously good natured reasoned argument and grace.
* I have read it now. It's very short, which is why some people call it a novella, and runs out of steam very rapidly. It's a poor parodic inversion of Kafka's Metamorphosis where people turn into cockroaches and introduce absurd and contrary policies (he tries a bit of Swift here maybe?).Predictable and megaphonic for me, about as wittily ironic as Dame Edna.
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