An important and timely book to understand the brexit conundrum by a reputable Irish journalist and author, Fintan O’Toole.
As an admirer of British culture and history I am horrified by the disfunctionality of UK’s politics over the last few years. The way they have been dealing with Brexit make the EU seem united. And EU’s officials look competent and professional in comparison to their british counterparts. Amazing.
Excerpts from the book:
“What I have attempted here is simply one possible answer to the most obvious question: how did a great nation bring itself to the point of such wilful self-harm? It may reasonably be objected that this is a family matter and that no outsider has the right to pry. I can but reply that as an Irish person I am a very close kind of outsider. My own country is profoundly affected by the crisis of English identity. This is our history, too.
… Scotland and Wales are largely absent because I argue that Brexit is essentially an English phenomenon.
… Brexit, a political phenomenon that is driven by ideas that would not otherwise combine… On the one hand, Brexit is fuelled by fantasies of ‘Empire 2.0’, a reconstructed global mercantilist trading empire in which the old white colonies will be reconnected to the mother country. On the other, it is an insurgency and therefore needs to imagine that it is a revolt against intolerable oppression. It therefore requires both a sense of superiority and a sense of grievance. Self-pity is the only emotion that can bring them together.
…
Not for nothing did the most brilliant and popular comic character of the post-war period in England, Tony Hancock, repeatedly play out three-part episodes in which his delusions of grandeur led to painful disappointment and luxurious self-pity. In 1971, around the time of the publication of the British government’s White Paper proposing entry into what was then the Common Market, the English writer Colin Wilson wrote:
Over the past twenty-five years, the English have built up a national grudge – perhaps due to disappointed expectations after winning the War – and now it is so firmly established that the country resembles one of those Strindbergian households where everybody nags and tries to make everybody else miserable.
On the other hand, the Germans at the end of the War had the same advantage as Britain at the beginning – of facing a crisis situation that left no room for resentment or petulance. The result was the German economic recovery. Meanwhile, like spoilt children, the English sit around scowling and quarrelling, and hoping for better times.
This is, of course, greatly exaggerated and overly generalized. But it has a grain of truth. Britain was entitled to a national grudge. As Arnold Toynbee reflected in 1962, ‘The consciousness of having once been heroes can be as great a handicap as the consciousness of having once failed to rise to the occasion. ’Britain had, after all, been on the winning side in the continent’s two great twentieth-century wars. And if the mythology of the ‘finest hour’ and of ‘standing alone’ in the early part of the Second World War was overdone, there had indeed been extraordinary resolve, ingenuity and heroism in 1940 during the Battle of Britain and afterwards in North Africa, Italy and northern Europe. It was by no means ridiculous to feel that Britain, in Spencer’s terms, had deserved much but received little.
It had lost its empire, become virtually bankrupt, suffered economic stagnation and, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 (just over a decade after the great triumph), had its pretensions as a world power brutally exposed. To make matters much worse, the former Axis powers of Japan, Germany and Italy were booming, as were France and the Benelux countries, all of whom had been rescued from the Nazis in part by the British. Who could avoid a sense of disappointed expectations?”
My take:
More than trying to convince anyone of the rights or wrongs of brexit this book makes you think about the underlying social and political motives. Shouldn’t this be the purpose of this type of books?
Some interesting reviews of this book. Two very positive, one not so much. Not surprisingly, the first two are from Irish and American papers and the latter is from the Times UK.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42267247-heroic-failure