Brexit is hard enough to live through without the Irish going bananas about the end of Britain

Joan Redmond is a high achieving young Irish historian who took a master’s in Cambridge and now teaches in King’s College London. She also tells us she’s married to an Italian. In the Irish Times she gives an account of how Brexit is making her feel insecure.

While Irish history has always had a presence in Cambridge, it is something of a declining force – for the worse, as we have seen with the current standard of debate and knowledge around Irish and British history in Brexit discussion.

I try to impress on my students how important Ireland is in the wider “British” story, and not just as an occasional or bit-part player: entire systems of English and “British” identity – empire and its associated issues, nationalism, religion – have a distinct green tinge.

Their level of knowledge is, at times, shocking: they learn little to nothing of a close neighbour’s history at school, and not much more of “their” history.

I love my job, and my colleagues: they are what keeps me going amid the Brexit insanity.

Perhaps living in this bubble was why Brexit was such a shock: Cambridge, as well as London, was one of the most heavily pro-Remain areas of the UK. When listening to and watching people in other parts of the UK outline their reasons for leaving, it is unfathomable at times, and self-destructive.

Coming from Ireland, where even though people criticise the EU, it is still a majority pro-EU country, the differences in public discourse and debate, levels of understanding, and attitudes can be astounding, and worrying.

I do fear for the future in some ways. I am concerned that Irish citizens appear to be becoming a kind of unicorn – European, while still accorded important rights in Britain – and that that situation surely cannot last..

Pessimism comes close to  prophetic doom at the keyboard of regular commentator Chris Johns  who sees in Brexit  “ the breaking of  Britain.”

.. the British media, with one or two exceptions, immediately bought into the narrative that the electorate now just wants Jeremy Corbyn and Teresa May to “get on with Brexit”. Surprisingly, it wasn’t just the ultra-right wing, billionaire owned bits of the press. Even the BBC was at it. In the unlikely event of a referendum on the future of the BBC, I would now vote to abolish it: the betrayal of its public broadcasting mandate has been grim to observe.

 

Secondly, there is the psycho-pathology of the whole thing. It’s tempting to talk about gaslighting, Orwellian double-speak, believing six impossible things by breakfast, confirmation bias and lots of other psychological theories and descriptions of the oddities of human behaviour. None of these come close to an explanation. Perhaps it is a form of mass psychosis.

Brexit is, in part, a spasm of fear about the way in which the world has changed over the last half century: votes for Leave were in many ways a cry to restore Britain back to a (mostly mythical) state circa 1955. But the changes that have already been wrought by Brexit are denied by the fundamentalists.

.. what can happens next? Most obviously, there will be a new prime minister, probably sooner rather than later.

The potential policy consequences of Jeremy Corbyn or Boris Johnson are, in their own ways, almost too awful to contemplate. Recent reports of personal wealth being quietly moved out of the country ahead of a Corbyn premiership are credible. More generally, the choice between these two men illustrates the stark divide already present; the way in which Britain is fracturing. We could even see both men, in relatively quick succession, becoming prime minister.

Business must hope that Britain’s unwritten constitution prevails and that political schism will have relatively few economic consequences. Or that, as in the case of the Trump presidency, the economy survives, more or less, an acutely divided society. That may, I suspect, be a forlorn hope, especially for the medium term.

The idea that Brexit is a form of psychosis with only a glancing relationship to reality has caught on big time among commentators in Ireland where right enough, it makes no sense at all. But Brexit is fiendishly difficult to handle precisely because the objections are well enough founded; the undemocratic spreading bureaucracy, the over-valued currency all are pressed to join, the slow growth, above all  the pressure towards  European integration that the  young Bonapartist  President Macron fancies is the solution to France’s considerable ills.  Some fear that the pace of integration has been blindly forced to near the point of  dis-integration, aggravated by fear of a refugee problem that is only just contained. Hopefully this fear too will prove exaggerated.

The urge of a mature democracy of 70 million  to feel more in charge of its  own affairs in hardly irrational even  if you believe – as I do with Johns –  that the Brexit analysis is terribly flawed.   

But so is some of the counterblast. In England, post imperial nostalgia plays a very minor role in the national consciousness. For good or ill, British democracy at the centre has always preferred the choice of first-past-the- post to the fudges of PR and   the sort of  dubious consensus against which much of Europe is rebelling. The ideal of  European unity peaked with the fall of the Wall in 1989 and was rapidly to be taken for granted as the natural route to salvation until the financial crash exposed the glaring differences in national political and economic development. Even so, faced with the decline of the British party system and the accompanying  bumpy transition to a Union state, I’d much prefer to take my chances within Europe than go it alone any day.

It’s not as if John’s worst fears are ridiculous. The  contorted expedient of the withdrawal agreement shows  the pro-Union parties have woken up to them, even though they haven’t yet found  the right  solution.

For  Ms Redmond (resonant name!)  diversity  is much to be enjoyed  in the metropolis and amid the dreaming spires. but less so in say, Oldham with wages flat  for over a decade and job quality poor. Only recently have they started to tackle voluntary ethnic apartheid.

Rather than scorn MPs over Brexit there is another way to look at it. This is how a mature democracy messily copes with evolutionary change. It creates a political watershed to  reach decisions. Much the same happened  a century ago over the expansion to  a full democracy reflecting the decisive shift of power from the land to industry and the first steps of the welfare state. These momentous  developments  were dramatised in a constitutional struggle between Peers and People  in 1909 -10 that subsided as soon as it was won. The two elections in a single year 1910 required for victory cost the Liberals dear. In fighting them the Liberals lost a 125 seat majority to arrive twice at a virtual dead heat with the Tories, leaving the Irish party in what seemed to be a commanding position but turned out to be significantly less.  The 1910 Parliament brought the Home Rule controversy to a head, out of which Irish independence was achieved after the intervening First World War.   Who’s to know what may happen over Brexit?

Like today for much of the time as it was happening, nobody could make a reliable guess at the outcome.  Granted that a deal over Brexit is proving more difficult to reach than almost everybody thought. But that’s no reason for despair or worse –  pity.  We are at a significant moment of history. We can’t yet discern  its outcome yet as we are still  groping our way through it.

Brian Walker

Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London