Post-factualism

British voters have made a choice that defies logic. The reasons for this are more complex than they appear. And they are very worrying

In voting for Brexit, British voters have made a rotten decision. Worse, they have consigned leadership of their country to vocal but foolish people who cannot build but only destroy, and have no idea what to do next.  As The Economist said on June 27, the UK is rudderless, with no-one willing to take responsibility for the decision or its consequences. Predictably, all my friends’ Facebook walls and Twitter feeds are full of comments about how bloody stupid the Brexit voters are.

The Full English. With beans

I resent this. As I explained in my previous piece, I was a Brexit supporter myself only a few years ago, and I refuse to accept that everyone who voted that way is a thick bastard. The unfair voting system in Britain means that most people are effectively disenfranchised and this was their only chance to protest. There has also been a feeling that English identity is denigrated. This is not imaginary. There’s a pic doing the rounds on social media today that shows lots of supposedly delicious European food on one side, and on the other, a solitary can of baked beans. I grew up on a traditional British diet, and my mother was a wonderful cook. I found the picture offensive. Racism is the big taboo of the liberal – unless it is against the English (or the Americans). That, it seems, is OK. So I understand why people voted Out.

That does not mean voting for Brexit was a good idea. And as Huffpost and others have reported, the Leave vote has led to a perceptible uptick in harassment and hate crime, with EU nationals (and non-white British people) being screamed at and asked when they are going home. This won’t, in the end, protect British or English identity; it will destroy it. As a German friend pointed out in a sincere and decent blog post (A Letter to English Racists) on June 27, for Germans, the racist crimes of one generation undermined the sense of identity of those that followed.

Moreover, while I can’t condemn Brexit voters wholesale, they should not be wholly off the hook. They are not all racist bigots, of course. But they have accepted lies and ignored facts, just as Germans did in the 1930s. Within 24 hours of the vote Leave leader Daniel Hannan staggered the BBC’s Evan Davis by admitting frankly on air that Brexit wouldn’t stop free movement from the EU, at least not if we want access to the single market. Meanwhile Boris Johnson wrote in the Telegraph on June 26 that: “British people will still be able to go and work in the EU; to live; to travel; to study; to buy homes and to settle down.” But this won’t be possible unless EU nationals can do the same in Britain. So either Johnson is lying, or this bitter referendum has been for nothing. As for the claim that pulling out would give us an extra £350 million a week to spend on the NHS, Nigel Farage now admits that won’t happen (and anyway, the figure was spurious).

But what is important is not that the Brexit leaders lied. It is that the facts did not matter. Michael Gove said the country was fed up with “experts”.  When the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that there could be a big financial black hole in the event of a Brexit, Nigel Farage said it was biased because it was part-funded by the EU. The IFS does get about 10% of its funding from the European Research Council, but this is a highly reputable funding agency and five of its grant recipients have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.  Anyone with Internet access could have found this out in five minutes, as I did. They didn’t bother. Let it be said, Cameron and Osborne were at it as well – as Peter Oborne pointed out back in May. But for barefaced lying, the Brexiteers took the biscuit.

Why did the voters not call them out on this?

Post-factualism
The answer is something very dangerous – post-factual politics. It’s a phrase that has been flying around in the US with regard to the Trump campaign, but the idea has been around for a while. As writer and former Sanders aide David Sirota wrote in the Huffington Post back in 2007 (Welcome to the Post-Factual Era): “Why is politics the only arena where those who turned out to be right still get flayed as outcasts, while those who are known to be utterly wrong get rewarded as visionaries? In business, if you make the wrong calls, you lose money and, most often, lose your job. ...In politics, it generally works the opposite way. The people who make the right call ... are punished with elite vitriol, and those who repeatedly make the wrong calls are vaulted into the highest echelons of the Establishment. ...Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Iraq War.” Sirota says this is “to do with where the money and power is.” He is part-right. But there is something else here. Politics has moved online and few people now engage politically face-to-face.  

The morning after the vote, I wrote the following on my Facebook page: “All the people moaning all over social media this morning should ask what they themselves could have been doing to prevent this disaster. With one exception, nobody I know has.” I then pasted an extract from a piece I had written three years earlier (actually after the death of Thatcher).  It was as follows:

In a 2008 Guardian article, Vernon Bogdanor pointed out that when Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 it had a membership of about 1.5 million; 30 years later it was down to 145,000. Labour underwent a similar decline between 1996 and 2008, from 400,000 to 150,000. In the 1950s one Briton in 11 had belonged to a political party; now just one in 88 did. Voter turnout, well over 80% in 1974, dropped to just 59% in 2001 (it has since recovered a little). ...There is an increasing disinclination to take part in the mainstream democratic process.

“This might be a good time to stop writing "Oh God I'm ashamed to be British" on your wall, and start thinking about how things change,” I added.

But why should politics on the Internet not be politics? Must we really go out on a wet winter night and huddle in a church hall somewhere with about four other people we don’t much like, arguing?

Yes, we must. 

The disputed view
We have lost the facility to argue, debate and reach consensus; we see only those arguments that accord with our own. This is true of me as much as almost everyone else; virtually none of my friends backed Brexit – yet the fact is, many other people on the Left did. But because they do not belong to the same social circles as me, I am not hearing their arguments. Had I been to a bunch of Labour Party meetings over the last six months, I would have done.  Nearly 40 years ago, as chairman of my university Liberal party, I travelled to Blackpool for a special party conference, to debate the arrangement the party then had with Callaghan’s Labour administration (not a coalition; it was basically confidence and supply). Several of our delegation were determined to end this arrangement. Halfway through a speech by the then Liberal Leader David Steel, a friend turned to me and said, “He’s right. I’ve changed my mind.” And so did I.

Would that happen now? Would we hire a draughty railway carriage and have it shunted from train to train to get to Blackpool, then listen to arguments for and against and make a decision?  Most of the people ranting about Brexiteers on my Facebook wall would not do so, and have not acquired the skills one needs to make a fellow-voter think again.

It goes deeper. Even 60 years ago, Party members were a minority, albeit a much bigger one. But people were still exposed to more debate than they are now.  For a start, they didn’t spend every evening in. Now they likely do. In December 2014 the Institute of Economic Affairs reported that the number of pubs had dropped from 58,000+ to 48,000 since 2006, a decline of nearly a fifth in just eight years.  There are a number of reasons for this decline; the IEA has ascribed it to the smoking ban, a decline in beer drinking as opposed to wine (the latter was expensive when I was young), increasing alcohol duty and more. Whatever is driving the drop in pub-going, however, it is a loss to democracy. I spent much of my misspent youth fishing cigarette-packets out of pools of beer while the person opposite me told me I was talking shit and made me defend what I had just said.

Social engagement: Central London, 1983

This is not just about pubs, or political parties. In January 1995 Robert D. Putnam published a paper called Bowling Alone. Later developed into a book, the paper posited that the propensity of people to associate with one another in civic fora was a key to a healthy democracy and to good governance. It was a thesis Putnam developed more fully in his famous (for academics) book Making Democracy Work, which examined the success of local government in northern and southern Italy. Civic engagement, said Putnam, was in decline. “The number of Americans who report that ‘in the past year’ they have ‘attended a public meeting on town or school affairs’ has fallen by more than a third (from 22 percent in 1973 to 13 percent in 1993). Similar (or even greater) relative declines are evident in responses to questions about attending a political rally or speech, serving on a committee of some local organization, and working for a political party.”

Putnam suggested several reasons why this was happening. Greater participation by women in the workforce had reduced the time they had for (for example) parent-teacher associations. However, he found that men’s attendance in civic fora had also declined. Putnam pointed to online shopping replacing the corner store (a decline in human contact), the growth of the VCR and, particularly, TV. “The new ‘virtual reality’ helmets that we will soon don to be entertained in total isolation are merely the latest extension of this trend. Is technology thus driving a wedge between our individual interests and our collective interests?”

Should we blame TV? Putnam himself admits that changes to people’s living environment, for example slum clearance, are also a factor, breaking up social networks. This will also have been a factor in Britain, where the built environment has changed immeasurably since 1945. Indeed, as far back as 1934, T.S. Eliot could write (in The Rock):

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor

Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance.

...Nor does the family even move about together.

But every son would have his motorcycle,

And daughters ride away on casual pillions. 

Slacktivism
But although TV may have kept people at home, historically, in Britain at least, it recreated the space for dispute and discussion. The BBC has always been required to reflect “balance” in its news coverage, and ITV also inherited this obligation when it started broadcasting in 1955. At that time there were only two TV channels; a third (BBC2) arrived in 1964 and a fourth (Channel 4) in 1982, but they were bound by the same strictures. Moreover the fact that there were few viewing options meant that there was a national conversation.  

This was certainly the case in the European referendum of 1975. In particular, two days before the vote, millions watched the Oxford Union debate between Edward Heath and Jeremy Thorpe on one side, and Peter Shore and the great Barbara Castle on the other. Castle (who spoke for Out) later felt that she had been a failure, but I remember the debate 41 years later, and I suspect I am not alone. To be sure, one shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about the quality of the 1975 argument (as this piece from Prospect demonstrates). But was there an event like the Union debate this time, in which the main players were picked up upon what they said, and made to defend it? I didn’t feel there was.

To an extent, this reflects a decline in the quality of the political class. That of 1975 understood history because they’d been part of it. Heath had taken part in the Normandy landings and seen the destruction in Europe. Castle had been brought up in the North during the Depression and her mother ran a soup-kitchen.  Cameron, by contrast, has never worked outside politics, and a growing number of the political class are the same.  But there is something else going on here: Slacktivism.

There are a few definitions of this, but broadly, it’s the use of social media to express one’s views, followed by a feeling that one has done what one can. In fact, posting on Facebook and “liking” posts about racism require no real commitment. Or risk; I am just old enough to remember the civil rights and Vietnam protests in the US. The cost to those who took part, and the fear involved, could be high. (If anyone doubts this, they can watch the remarkable documentary Freedom Riders – a story of a time when activists, African-American but also some white middle-class liberals, did more than just click ‘like”, and were threatened and beaten for their pains.) No problem now. Click Like and all your friends will roar approval, because, of course, your friends mostly share your views. I am as guilty of this as anyone else.

Just how this works was described very well by sociologist Joel Busher in his excellent recent book on the English Defence League, The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest. A recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another. Much of this happens online. It is as true of people like me, on the Left, as it is of the EDL. There are no more draughty church halls. There are no more cigarette packs soaked in slops. No-one need watch Newsnight anymore. Politics has become a dialogue of the deaf. No-one who does not share my views will hear my arguments, and I will not hear theirs.

This is why we had a disaster last Thursday. All the information about the consequences of this vote was available beforehand; the threat to the Northern Ireland peace process, the fact that we would still have to have free movement of people (or limited access to EU markets), the fact that the UK might break up, that the pound would fall, that markets (and thus pensions) would have millions of pounds wiped off their value; it was all there. But no-one thought of these facts when they went to vote. They had felt no need to acquaint themselves with them.  People’s interactions are now grouped in vertical silos, into which no information may enter from any source that they have not chosen. It has thus never been easier to manipulate people, for they are complicit in their own deception.

Few people outside Britain welcomed the Brexit vote, but those who did included Marine Le Pen and Greece’s Golden Dawn. “A direct consequence of Brexit will be the empowerment of patriotic and nationalist forces across Europe,” said Golden Dawn’s spokesman, Ilias Kasidiaris.

I can hear the drip, drip, drip of factoids being fed into those vertical silos right now. It’s the Poles. They’re scrounging bastards. They’ve taken your job. Those bastards. It’s the Romanians. It’s the Tutsis. It’s the Gypsies. It’s the Jews. The Jews. The Jews. The Jews.

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

 Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Thinking of voting Leave? I'd have done, once

A post for Brits: Are you thinking of voting to leave the EU? For years I wanted a chance to do the same. But I have been thinking hard

As I write this (on June 12), the latest polls show the voters swinging backwards and forwards on Brexit.  The BBC quotes a poll from June 10 that puts Brexiteers at 55%. Other polls disagree but right now it looks like Leave.

If anyone wants to know why so many Brits are itching to get out of the EU, they needn’t bother looking at the spurious tripe and specious data shoved out by the Remain and Leave campaigns. No-one believes any of it. The real reason Brexit has so much support can be gleaned from a statement made by actress Emma Thompson at the Berlin Film Festival back in February.  She was quoted in The Guardian as saying that Britain was “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island”, that she “just felt European”. These are the elite attitudes that are driving British, and especially English, votes into the Brexit camp, and reading that was nearly enough to make me vote “Leave” as well. Many voters wish the liberal middle class would just take themselves off to Tuscany, then, if that’s where they’d rather be. It’s part of the same “culture wars” that are leading voters towards Trump in the US.

Harold Wilson, instigator of the 1975 referendum (Vivienne)

But this is dangerous.  As Owen Jones said in a typically intelligent piece, also in The Guardian, on June 10: “When presented with a vote on the status quo, it is no surprise that those with the least stake in it vote to abandon it... Threats of economic Armageddon resonate little with people living in communities that feel ignored, marginalised and belittled.”  The Leave campaign, says Jones, is much the same as Trump’s, “powerful vested interests ...masquerading as the praetorian guard of an anti-establishment insurgency.” He is so right. If some of the polls are to be believed, on June 23 millions of Brits will traipse into polling booths to vote against their own interests. In voting against their perceived enemies in the ‘liberal’ elite, people will be voting for their real enemies. And reading statements like Emma Thompson’s one understands, with horrible clarity, how this has happened.

I voted to stay in Europe in 1975. Later I regretted it. For years I wanted a chance to vote the other way. But I shan’t. I am voting to stay in the EU, and I think my fellow-Brits should too. Some will have to swallow some bile to do so. This post explains why I think they should.

Let’s start with the last referendum, 42 years ago.

Another country

The past is another country and in 1975, Britain certainly was. I worked in a bookshop and when I prepared an invoice, I did it on an ancient Remington manual typewriter, keeping carbons for the file. When I sold a book, I handwrote the amount on a paper till roll; the till itself was made of wood and the tray slid out with a pleasant kerching. Much of the country’s heat and light was still from coal – even the trains had run on it less than 10 years before, and the stations were blackened by smoke.  A long coal strike in early 1974, combined with the 1973 oil crisis, had damaged the economy badly. Inflation was, by modern standards, very high, and in June, the month of the referendum, it went over 26%.  I remember that in early 1975 my wages were raised from £845 a year to £1,495, to reflect this. It was not unusual.

Yet if the country was different, the politics of the referendum were oddly similar. Labour had returned to power in February 1974 in the wake of the miners’ strike, and had pledged to renegotiate the terms under which Britain had entered the European Economic Community the year before. This was popular, as the previous Tory government had broken a 1970 promise to hold a referendum before entry. Labour’s renegotiation did not, as I recall, change the terms that much, but Prime Minister Harold Wilson advocated a Yes (remain) vote; at the same time, however, he allowed members of his government to campaign on either side, to prevent a disastrous split in his party. Does this sound familiar?

But the quality of the debate was much higher. There are no giants like Barbara Castle and Denis Healey around today. And some of the issues, too, were different. Many Leave voters were incensed by the way we seemed to have turned our back on the Commonwealth by joining Europe; we had, they said, kicked our allies in teeth for the sake of our enemies. The war in Europe had ended barely 30 years earlier; it was not yet really history, and feelings still ran high. There was also a huge economic risk in the reduction of tariff barriers with Europe. Britain was still a major industrial power, but was slipping badly; its goods were declining in quality. French and German cars, for example, were better assembled – British ones could be maddeningly unreliable. Some wondered if British industry would survive the competition. It was a pertinent point; over the course of 1975, unemployment rose from 3.3% to 5.1%.

I was aware of this and especially of the Commonwealth dimension, and I seem to remember I thought quite hard, or as hard as I ever did back then (I was 18). But in the end I voted to stay in the EEC, at least partly because I felt that most European countries were more modern and democratic, and would be a good influence on us.

A grandiose dream?

It was a long time before I changed my mind. I can remember being angered when all our petrol pumps had to be converted to litres. British people didn’t use these to measure fuel consumption, and still don’t, so this was pointless (though it would likely not happen now).  Then I started to feel very uneasy after Maastricht, which seemed to presage a European state. Such a superstate would have been an artificial creation that would eventually have cracked apart, almost certainly with violence. It was a grandiose and vainglorious notion dreamed up by a  rootless elite who felt more comfortable with each other than with their own people.

The Berlaymont - grandiose? (Anderson Pecorone)

And yet the driving dream behind the EU – peace and stability in Europe, after centuries of war – was always a noble one; something that many in the UK never really understood. To many Brits, Maastricht was as much an attempt to destroy us as 1940 had been.  Many have seen the EU as little more than a French plot against Britain. I never approved of “ever-closer union”. But I never saw it as the evil plot that many of my parents’ generation did. So I felt torn about Europe.

What fixed my opinions was two and a half years in Brussels. I went there as a long-term consultant on an EU-funded programme for technical assistance to the former Soviet Union. This programme did some good things but pushed an economic model that most Russians probably did not want. I also did not feel comfortable in Brussels. The city itself is pleasant enough, and Belgium in general deserves a better press. Yet I always sensed an attitude to foreigners; it was not quite hostility, more a quiet non-acceptance.  Also, it rained a lot. And the EU establishment depressed me – the bureaucrats detached from civil and diplomatic services who saw Brussels as a step up, or in some cases as a refuge; the ‘stagiaires’, or interns, screaming acronyms at each other in noisy pubs; the huge self-important buildings, especially the Berlaymont, then wrapped in sheeting for asbestos removal – grandiosity again; and the endless paperwork before anything got done.  Then in 2001 I got a chance to move to Rome, as a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. I jumped at it, and will never forget emerging into the bright Roman sunshine and giving thanks. For the next decade I remained a firm Brexiteer.

I’m not any more. For one thing, Cameron’s renegotiation exempted the UK from “ever-closer union” – but this was not, in truth, a big concession; the European super-state has been dead in the water for some time. No-one ever really wanted it, and the Euro crises of recent years, culminating in the bitter humiliation of Greece, have killed it off for good. But there are several other reasons for my re-think.

Movement of people

The first reason why I’ve changed my mind is the enormous exchange of population between Britain and the rest of the EU. It can’t be reversed. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are nearly 800,000 people of Polish descent in Britain now (not all because of the EU; in the early 1950s there were already some 150,000, most of whom had arrived during or after the war). There are also hundreds of thousands of French nationals in England – the French think it is up to 400,000, mostly in London. According to the 2011 Census, there were about 2.68 million people in Britain who had been born elsewhere in the EU. Meanwhile about 1.3 million UK nationals live elsewhere in the EU – about half in Spain, to which many retire.

Even if free movement is abrogated completely, it is inconceivable that all these people could or should be repatriated; it would involve forced mass migrations last seen in Europe in 1945-46 (and those were not something one would wish to repeat). Moreover our economy would collapse. So the immigration argument for Brexit holds little water; yes, we have had a huge net inward migration from the EU, but those people aren’t going anywhere. They will have to be given residence permits. It is not even clear that the UK could prevent further free movement, as it might be a condition of continued access to the EU single market.  Attempting to restrict it could also threaten the Irish peace process, a threat that Ireland does not deserve – and a reminder that this referendum isn’t just about us.

There is one immigration-related argument with which I have some sympathy. People are understandably unimpressed that Romanians and Bulgars with no links to Britain can move there, whereas an architect in Brisbane or a database designer in Hyderabad cannot, even if they have family in Britain. But Brexit would not change this. First, Australia and India do not permit free movement of UK citizens, and it’s unlikely the UK would make a non-reciprocal deal. Second, as stated above, to keep access to EU markets we’ll need to accept free movement to some extent. In that context, no UK government is likely to permit freer entry of Commonwealth citizens as well. In any case, the right-wingers who will be in charge after Brexit are unlikely to be sympathetic to any non-white immigration. More family members from the subcontinent? Forget it.

So much for immigration. It is something many British people care about deeply, having seen their communities, their high streets and their workplaces change with lightning speed, and without their consent. But Brexit will do little to change any of this.

European security

Meanwhile, a grave argument against Brexit is security and stability. The Leave camp insists that this is a matter for NATO, not the EU, and that it is therefore irrelevant. It is not.

First, NATO has historically been driven by the US, and today it is at least as interested in Asia. As I write this, the State Department’s attention is probably more on the Spratly Islands than Ukraine. A British exit will send a dangerous message to Moscow.

Franco with his Prime Minister shortly before his death in 1975

This will be even more dangerous if Britain’s departure leads to an unravelling of the EU in general, as some (including, it is said, Angela Merkel) believe it might. Besides exposing Europe to external threats, it could reverse the peace within Europe that it has enjoyed for most of my lifetime. Not because France and Germany would be at each other’s throats (they wouldn’t), but because the EU has been the driver for a wholesale growth in democracy in Europe. It is easy to forget that in 1975, Spain was still under the dictatorship of General Franco – he was to die that November – and Greece and Portugal had thrown off authoritarian regimes only the previous year.  The prospect of EU membership was an incentive for these countries to adopt democratic regimes and they have retained them. Even more important, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989-91 left a vacuum that could easily have been filled by the type of semi-fascist governments that dominated the region before 1939. Again, the prospect of EU membership came, for many in the east, to symbolise the drive for modernity and an escape from the past.

Do we wish to reverse that? The far right has reappeared in Europe and the EU is a bulwark against it. Again, it is a reminder of something that many in Britain either forget, or willfully ignore: This referendum is not just about us.

A democratic deficit?

We also need to stop believing that leaving the EU will be some sort of liberation from an oppressive bureaucracy. Let’s start with the supposed democratic deficit in Brussels.

The Fall of the Wall: An EU peace in Eastern Europe? (Lear 21)

To be sure, the European Commission is not properly elected and sometimes seems unaccountable. But in theory, at least, its members must be approved by the European Parliament. Moreover, while the Parliament can’t dismiss individual Commissioners once they’re in office, it can dismiss the Commission as a whole. So when one Commissioner, Édith Cresson, refused to resign in January 1999 following a corruption scandal, the Parliament threatened to throw out the entire Commission (which resigned en masse before that could happen).  

The European Parliament is properly elected under a proportional system. The Westminster Parliament is not. The current UK government has the votes of only 24% of the electorate – and only about 37% of the votes actually cast. “Out” voters may want to ponder the fact that UKIP got one Westminster seat for its 3.9 million votes, while the Tories got a seat for every 44,000 votes and Labour one seat per 34,000 votes. Worse, the government drawn from this “elected” parliament has complete authority; as long as it retains a majority, it will not be dismissed, and is virtually unaccountable. Moreover it can do pretty much what it likes; there is an unelected Lords that can delay but not prevent its legislation, and a Head of State who by convention does neither. Britain is, in fact, marginal for being called a democracy, and anyone wishing to address the “democratic deficit” had best start at home.

An independent, influential UK?

The last serious argument against Brexit, for me, is the global dimension.The Brexit camp would have you believe that, out of Europe, Britain could pick up its pre-EU threads and continue to influence world events at the top table. This is deluded.

First, the EU as a bloc is a bigger and more important entity than the UK. Assuming it survives Brexit, the great powers will talk to it or to its prime mover, Germany – not to us. Ah, the Leave campaign will say, but we’re still the world’s fifth largest economy, a nuclear power and a member of the UN Security Council. They’ll talk to us as well.

Let’s examine this.

One of the first things that will happen if Britain votes “Leave” is that the Scottish Nationalists will attempt to hold a new independence referendum. This won’t automatically happen, as the SNP lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament in May 2016. However, it is only two seats short, and if any one of the other parties were to support it in this matter, it could prevail. Even if they did not do so, it is not hard to imagine one or two renegades from the other parties supporting the motion. The 2014 vote against independence, though clear, was not a landslide. A Leave vote in the UK as a whole would probably make many Scots think again – especially if, as seems likely, Scotland votes Remain.

There would be two consequences. First, the UK would be diminished. Only about 10% of the population would be lost, but the permanence of the UK as an entity would be cast into doubt. Second, the UK nuclear deterrent would have to leave its current base at Faslane. This would raise the cost of renewing Trident, already put at about £100 billion (though this is a lifetime cost; the initial outlay would be smaller). Given the economic uncertainty that would follow Brexit, the government of the truncated UK would have to think hard about this – and about the political cost of imposing a nuclear submarine base on some new location, possibly Plymouth.

A smaller country, without a nuclear deterrent. The case for retaining our permanent seat on the UN Security Council, already shaky, might now be untenable – especially as other member states could argue that the UK was no longer the country to which the seat was allocated in 1945 (a thin argument, but it will be used). Out of Europe. Off the Security Council. No longer of significance in Washington. Let us hope Argentina does not then invade the Falklands, for there will be few to support us if they do.

What are we left with, after Brexit? At home, we will have an inbuilt Conservative majority at Westminster. It isn’t hard to see why right-wing interests are so keen on Brexit. Boris Johnson or (more likely) Michael Gove would become Prime Minister, and the loss of the Scottish electorate and the rigged electoral system will keep him there. Social welfare will come to an end and the NHS will be put out to tender. 

Millions of ordinary English voters, affronted by remarks such as Emma Thompson’s, will march into the booths on the 23rd and mark the cross for Leave, thinking they are voting against the likes of her. But they won’t be. They will be voting for their real enemies. Meanwhile, a rump country, diminished in the world, will watch its remaining influence slip away and realize, too late, that the Leave vote has brought the long post-imperial twilight to an end.

This piece is also on the VoxEurop site, here.

Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads

Mike Robbins's essay Such Little Accident: British democracy and its enemies 

was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops

(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)

When the best lack all conviction

On a sunny day in September 2001 I answered the phone for an American colleague who had stepped out. It was her mother, calling from the States. “When she comes back, tell her to look online or turn on the TV,” she told me. “Something is happening in New York.”  Since then I have sometimes felt that the world itself has been a plane that is out of control, spinning towards hell while the crew scream and curse at each other on the flight deck. People die in their thousands in the Mediterranean and are of no more account than sardines struggling in a seine net, so much sacred life extinguished every day; while in the Middle East there are constant acts of random cruelty. Across Europe people turn to far-right parties, while Britain seems set to turn its back on its neighbours altogether.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, ...
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats wrote those lines in 1919. It seems now too that everyone is either vengeful and angry, or cynical and defeated. But I am sure that is not so. In every generation there are people who have chosen to serve good over evil. They have not always been that good at telling the difference. Victor Gollancz, about whom I wrote here last year (Being Beastly to the Germans, January 2015), is a case in point. Heather Campbell, discussed below, is another. But both wanted to leave the world a better place, and were prepared to make sacrifices to do so.

I have just been reading two books, one by Campbell, the other by another woman who was also profoundly idealistic. Neither profited by it. The first turned her life upside down for an ideal that turned to ashes, and was forced to seek a different path.The second, Rachel Corrie, lost her life in Gaza aged just 23.They belonged to different generations, but neither lacked conviction. And they remind us that we have a choice.

Heather Campbell: My Polish Spring
In 1949 ice skater Heather Campbell met her husband Ian on a tour to Paris. Both ardent Marxists, they took part in a Bastille Day celebration together. They married in England the following year. Then Ian Campbell, who was doing scientific research for the British Medical Research Council, met some Polish diplomats and conceived the idea of helping them build socialism by contributing to Polish science. Thus in 1951 he and Heather, now eight months pregnant, slipped away from England via Zurich and Prague.

 
“Slipped away” is the right phrase. It is difficult, now, to comprehend the gravity of the barrier that had been drawn across Europe. I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s; the Iron Curtain was still very much there, but the worst excesses of Stalinism had gone. By the mid-1970s British families could and occasionally did go on holiday in Poland, or the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, even if they were not Communist Party members. Even then, however, Warsaw Pact citizens could not travel freely. In 1951 the whole of Eastern Europe was locked down so tight, and relations between East and West so poor, that crossing that border was a very big deal. The Campbells did not tell their families where they were going. Ian did, it seems, have a guarantee that they would be able to contact them when they arrived in Poland, but this guarantee was not honoured, and they would not be able to tell their families where they were for years.

In their early years in Poland, the Campbells didn’t question this. They just decided it must be for the good of the Party. Only slowly did they realise that the convicts they saw working in the street were not criminals or “counter-revolutionaries”, but people who fought Fascism in the wrong uniform, then made the mistake of coming home. They were shocked when Poles started returning from Siberia, where they had been sent arbitrarily, and arrived exhausted and starving after hellish journeys lasting a month. They also started to sense that the Poles were not happy and would not abandon Catholicism. Meanwhile, they themselves were kept inactive in a Party guesthouse outside Warsaw, and Ian was unable to work until many months after their arrival. Bit by bit, the Campbells saw that they had bought into a sham. But as their disillusion with Stalinism grew, so did their love of the Polish people. Then Stalin died. At first the thaw was slow, but in 1956 Kruschev denounced Stalin, and the reformer Władysław Gomułka took control in Poland. Meanwhile Heather Campbell was thinking again about what she really believed, and that was her Polish spring.

Władysław Gomułka

My Polish Spring was written in the 1980s for circulation within Poland in “samizdat” (underground) form. Even now that the Eastern Bloc has collapsed, however, it’s a valuable historical document. There is no blow-by-blow inside account of the end of Stalinism, or the events of 1956; Campbell barely mentions the Hungarian Revolution at all, although she does talk of politics. Rather, it’s an eyewitness account of Poland in the 1950s. There must be plenty such accounts in Polish, but in English this is likely rare. Small details resonate – the Party moves the Campbells from flat to flat, and they don’t ask why; a kind Polish official smuggles out a letter home; a Pole who has returned, shattered, from years in Siberia is gently eased back into the world by a young girl working in the same shop. The sheer destruction that had been visited upon Poland is there too. Upon arrival, the Campbells are driven to a building in the middle of a wasteland. They ask how far they are from Warsaw and are told they’ve just driven through the city centre.

 
In the end, the Campbells were to be converted to a different belief system; no need to say here what it was, but it may not surprise the reader that much. It may be that they were people who needed to believe, and could not live with the element of doubt that most of us accept in the search for meaning. But they were clearly very decent, and likely left the world a better place than they found it. They returned to England in 1959 and devoted much of the rest of their lives to public service. Ian Campbell died in 2004 and Heather in 2014, aged 89.

Reading My Polish Spring, I did have mixed emotions about the Campbells themselves. I wondered how they could have been so deluded about Stalinist Europe, and how they could have adhered so unquestioningly to any ideology in a century torn apart by such things. But they belonged to a generation brought up against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the political failures and wars that followed it. Against that backdrop, it is not hard to understand why the “other side” might have looked better in 1949. Also, one must accept that in 1949 clear information about the East was not so easily available; there were no YouTubers, no fierce debates on Facebook or Weibo, no photos of tortured dissidents on Twitter. That is not to excuse the Campbells for their naivety; they should still have known better. But they had more excuses than we would for not doing so. I also sensed their integrity and unselfishness, and their personal warmth towards the people around them. Whatever one says of their judgement, they did not “lack all conviction”.

Neither did Rachel Corrie.

Rachel Corrie: Let Me Stand Alone

On March 16 2003, Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist from Olympia in the US state of Washington, was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while attempting to protect a Palestinian house in Gaza. The exact circumstances are disputed. The Israeli Defense Force has claimed that the driver did not see her. Friends of Corrie who were present claimed that he must have done. Either way, it would be easy for Corrie to be forever defined by her death. I wonder if her parents put Let Me Stand Alone together at least in part to reclaim her identity as someone who lived as well as died. This collection of her writings, notes, emails and other fragments does just that.

Corrie was born in 1979 and bought up in Olympia, Washington State, close to Puget Sound. The earliest entries in this book are from when she was about 10 (her parents can’t always date them precisely). She clearly loved to write from an early age, and some of her poetry is charming. A poem called Wind, written before she was 11, shows real talent.

As she gets older her poetry does get stranger, and less easy to understand. So do some of the prose pieces that she writes about her surroundings, and about deaths in the family. But there are also glimpses of a normal girl growing up; aged about 14, she describes going to a dance: “The good thing about dances is the darkness. They aren’t a showcase for fashion like the halls, and I can forget this body I loathe.” With this piece is a poignant little sketch of a tall thin girl clutching a handbag and saying tentatively, “I’ve come for the party?” An arrow points to her legs with the words, “Stupid pants”.

From early on she seems to have had a strong, idealistic sense of right and wrong. Aged about 12: “Dear Soldier, I guess I don’t really understand the world, because I don’t see …Why people can’t make compromises. Why peace is still a vision …I must be ignorant, because I believe that it’s unnecessary for forty thousand children to die every day. I know I am just a little sixth grader who writes poetry and worries about grades and makeup, but I worry about bigger things.” 

In early 1995 Corrie, then nearly 16, travelled to Sakhalin in Russia’s Far East as an exchange student and was profoundly impressed by the experience. Quite normal things – coal dust in the snow, drinking tea – became very vivid memories, as did the journey via Anchorage and Magadan; she had not left the USA before. From then on she became even more idealistic, and disenchanted with the American way of life. Three years later, by her own account, she bursts into tears in a supermarket in the US because she is surrounded by “every variety of dead cow you could ever want” and cannot rid herself of a strange image of people dying in Moscow because the heating pipes have burst and they fall into the water. Meanwhile Corrie does shifts as a social worker and relief-provider for carers, and advisor to the mentally ill.

It would be easy to get the impression, from this, that Corrie was someone who needed to get a life of her own as well as worrying about other people’s. But she had one. She writes with great warmth about her long-term boyfriend, with whom she eventually broke up, but who remained close to her until her death. She is also delighted by the details of the world around her, and often writes of the salmon that spawn in the local rivers, about water and sunshine, and about people seen on a bus, landscapes, the town at night. Sometimes, when the mood takes her, she can be pleasantly mad. In a piece written sometime after she was 18 (again, her parents can’t date it exactly), she writes that she wants to see “people in tutus. Cops wearing sombreros. Stockbrokers with horned Viking hats. Priests with panties on their heads. In the world I’m building …People have speakers attached to the their chests that pour out music so you can tell from a distance what mood they’re in …Football players get paid in hamburgers, senators get paid in scalps, first ladies carry handcuffs and bullwhips, and presidents wear metal collars.”

Neither is Corrie always so sure of herself. In a long plain-verse poem written when she was 23, she describes taking patients to Dairy Queen and having to admonish them for their behaviour:

And he cried some more
And called me a hairy little bitch sabotaging his ice cream day
So I refocused him
On his own anxiety

…and I said I hear that you’re feeling angry
But you’ll have to use appropriate social skills and language
Or there won’t be any more Dairy Queen

…asked me just exactly what I was threatening to do to Dairy Queen
You power-drunk little
Overeducated slut 

Two months later, in late January 2003, Corrie arrived in Gaza, encouraged by a fellow-activist to join the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a group calling for peaceful non-violent protest against Israeli action against Palestinians that at that time included the destruction of Palestinian houses on the borders of Gaza that the Israeli Defense Forces stated was to prevent smuggling. Her emails and notes ooze anger over what was happening in Gaza, and are a vivid depiction of the fear and uncertainty confronting its people. Exactly what she felt about Israel, and the extent to which she tried to understand Israeli perceptions of the conflict, isn’t clear from her writings. However, in a long letter to her mother dated February 27 2003, she says: 

Speaking of words – I absolutely abhor the use of polarities like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ – especially when applied to human beings. I think these words are the enemy of critical thinking. They are an escape from finding solutions and are an incitement to further violence.

Less than three weeks later Corrie stood in front of a bulldozer that was attempting to destroy the house of a Palestinian pharmacist and his brother; she knew the family. The bulldozer killed her. As stated earlier, exactly how or why is disputed. Meanwhile some people will always see her as a martyr, while others will feel strongly that it was not her quarrel and that she should not have been there. What does seem clear from this book is that she was not seeking martyrdom in any way; in fact, in her last emails, she was wondering what to do when she left Gaza. Neither does she seem to have been a fanatic; the Dairy Queen verses suggest a young woman questioning her own motives and character. What she does have, though, is that deep sense of right and wrong, and a feeling that she must act where she sees things that are wrong; and I wonder how many older people read this book and sense a gentle reproach from their younger selves.

There are several videos of Corrie on the web, including one of an interview with her very shortly before her death. But if you’ve read Let Me Stand Alone, one is particularly hard to watch. It seems to have been taken when she was 10, and attended an event to support publication of UNICEF’s State of the World’s Children. She is making a plea on behalf of children worldwide, but she is too far from the microphone. An adult puts her hands on Corrie’s shoulders and gently moves her in front of the mic.

This would be about the time she wrote a poem called For Gram with love:

Over a fence
by an old rusty rail
came the whispery
twitch of a cream-colored tail.

Over the fence

By a big haystack

Came the pat of a paw

Soft and black.

...Over the fence
In the tallest grass
Came the twitch of a whisker
Shiny as glass.

_______________________

Heather Campbell’s My Polish Spring is available for Kindle for $1.99 in the US. It is also available as an eBook from some other online retailers, including Kobo and Apple iBooks. Rachel Corrie’s Let Me Stand Alone is available for Kindle for $10.99 but can also be found in hardback (secondhand), paperback, and other forms, including audio CD

Mike Robbins's account of his own life as a volunteer in Sudan, Even the Dead are Coming, is available as an eBook (ISBN 978-0-9914374-4-3) and paperback (ISBN 978-0-5780356-9-7) from bookshops and online retailers