After the chaos comes the entrenchment. It’s the natural swing of the pendulum. There were a few days when the earthquake of the vote threw up some of those real but inconvenient emotions like regret, shame, horror at what had happened, and then the desire for stability reasserts itself with its concomitant stubbornness. Whilst stability is desirable, it’s only under the pressure of chaos that change can happen (the status quo being so seductive). We really need change, but it’s an unruly beast; we need to think extremely hard about what good change might look like.
George Sand declared that an ideal state was like an ideal marriage – it should be founded on the principles of equality and mutual respect – and she was onto something, I think. Especially now that the UK has served divorce papers on the EU and any number of dependent unions have spiralled into confusion, including the union of the political parties, the union of the United Kingdom, and the union of the voting people. The result has not made those in either Inner or Outer camp more understandable to each other. There’s been a painfully fascinating programme on BBC2 this week about divorce, focusing on the work of mediators. I’ve got a theory that any ugly human behavior arises essentially out of defensiveness, and the couples on this documentary are the most amazing examples of angry and bitter defensiveness. They are so entrenched in their sense of resentment, so wrapped up in their own feelings that they are completely blind to each other. I think it’s a risk we all run in this country at the moment – understandably, given what’s happened – and nothing good comes of it. The mediators’ first job is to try to get the warring parties to listen to one another, actually and genuinely hear what the other is saying. As I’ve been watching the news unfold (obsessively) over the past week, there have been several things that have struck me as worth hearing.
I’ll include a link at the bottom of this post to the brilliant video by Michael Dougan, a law professor at Liverpool University, whose argument is that the Leave campaign was one of systematic deception at an industrial level. If you listen to him factually dismantle every last one of their weasel claims, I’m not sure how you could argue against him. Which begs the question: how can politicians be allowed to get away with public lying? There was a very good letter to one of the broadsheet papers from a doctor, who said that if a surgeon had knowingly misled a patient about the treatment of his condition, and made the first incision with no idea what to do next, he would be struck off the medical register. So why on earth don’t we have a political register, which details those who are eligible to stand as decent representatives of the UK. And why don’t we legislate against public lying in the service of winning votes? If politicians had to face legal consequences for misleading the public, maybe they would do so less often? Here’s a thought: why don’t all those doctors who voted Leave in the hope of getting money for the NHS take out a class action for their money, from the personal pockets of Gove, Johnson and Farage? If there is one thing to come out of the political mess we find ourselves in, it must be some kind of regulation of political practice. We reached the absolute zenith with Boris Johnson – a man sacked twice for lying – standing as a candidate for PM. He may not still be a candidate but there is nothing to stop him from returning to public life in the future – and there should be.
As for this question of a second referendum, Switzerland is the country we might care to take a look at. Back in 2014 Switzerland voted against the imposition of immigration quotas by the EU. The Swiss are not full EU members but they have bilateral agreements so they can trade in the single market. Since that time, the EU has steadfastly refused to negotiate on the immigrant question and the Swiss have no desire for the economic suicide we are contemplating. So it looks inevitable that a second referendum will have to be called in the (possibly vain) hope of breaking the deadlock. In fact, there are several small countries who are agitating against the EU’s quotas (Hungary has started up this week) and it might have been sensible to consider some sort of alliance among all these countries in the hope that a block protest could shift EU thinking. There is much that is wrong in the EU and many who’d like to change it, but evidently the EU will be determined to show entrenchment at the moment in order to discourage other countries from staging referendums. And of course we can no longer be involved in any alliances because we’ve already voted out and have nothing to bargain with. If you leave book club because you don’t like the book choices, you don’t get to choose books for book club. We can only sit on the sidelines now and hope that something happens to make the EU rethink its stance.
The current downturn in the economy is nothing compared to the disaster that will hit us if and when we invoke article 50. Because the EU has undertaken all our trade negotiations for the past 40 years, we have no trained international trade negotiators. A fact China underlined this week by saying (I quote Dougan) that it didn’t realize the UK had the 500 people and 10 years at its disposal to broker a deal with them. Well hang on in there, China, because we may soon have more than enough unemployed who need to retrain. And maybe fill the offices of Whitehall with the staff required to undertake the unimaginable mass of paperwork that will constitute divorce from the EU. But what will we do in the UK if we lose the bulk of European trade? Well, I guess we could become a tax haven, given the London banks have been close enough to singleminded money laundering for the past few years. And I guess we could trade with the countries in the world no one else will have anything to do with. We’ll have to be a lot less picky about where we get our money from in the future.
My last point is a cultural one, in a week that has seen the rather frightening rise of the Far Right. It’s been coming for a while now, this creeping endorsement of hatred. I say hatred rather than racism, because race is just an excuse. In my mind, it began with the internet, and all those open comment forums where people were free to leave whatever bile was in their mind unreproached by moderators. The comment section of the online Guardian newspaper is evidence enough of the kind of thing that goes on. Hatred isn’t something you can persuade or educate away. If people are open to that kind of angry hatred then it just lives in them, waiting for the spark to light it. You can only restrain it, let it be known that that kind of emotion is not acceptable in a civilised world. Because if you let the energy of hatred loose, it’s one hell of a genie to put back in the bottle. I can only urge all internet users to act firmly against this sort of hatred – do not accept it or allow it permission in the interests of showing all sides of a debate. Do not let it have any kind of voice.
Finally, a point made by Mr Litlove in response to this week’s commemoration of the Battle of the Somme. While the bravery of those who went into battle is unquestionable, Mr Litlove pointed out that no one got to do anything heroic. The soldiers were told to walk towards Berlin without stopping, and they were simply mown down in their thousands within minutes. It is one of the most strategically senseless battles of modern history, in which tens of thousands of young men made the ultimate sacrifice because of the stupidity of their leaders. If it stands for anything this week, let the Battle of the Somme stand for the unimaginable extent of human folly, in the toxic combination of panic, pressure, the need to ‘show’ other countries what we’re made of, the underlying viciousness of humans to one another and the objectification of individual life in the service of some greater cause. Let’s think carefully about the potential extent of human folly, and do what we can to stay sensible.
