THE DEGENERATION OF ENGLAND WAS MANAGED AND DIRECTED
Many opponents of Brexit, especially of course those on the left, like to think that Brexit is an expression of the plutocracy. That is not a view that will bear analysis. Business in general did not want Brexit, and when it came, the international media reacted with bewilderment and stupefaction. That was what the international elite felt. It may also be said that it was what the majority of the public across the board felt, but it certainly was what the one per centers felt. It was not what business, in Britain or abroad, wanted; and therefore, it is not what most rich people wanted. Most businesses are perfectly aware of the conditions of modern trade and at any rate are against anything that disrupts conditions. They would have hated Brexit just as they would have hated a war, because it would throw a whole lot of unpredictable factors into the wheels. Business, both big and small, likes conditions that are predictable, safe, and incidentally allow as much access to as many markets as possible. No, it was not the rich as such who supported Brexit. It was a certain amount, a minority at best, of rich people with a bee in their bonnets.
If that was the case, you may ask, why did we not hear more from an opposing party of rich people and big business? Well, for a start, we did. Remember all the talk about "project fear"? Many of the people who informed us of the things they could see coming, and were insulted for their pains, were in fact people who knew what they were talking about. But big business in general hates to be conspicuous in any way. For the same reason, the very same reason, why they hate disruption and uncertainty, they hate being visible. With the exception of media companies, big business prefers everything to be done without fuss, without controversy, without any appeal to public opinion. When was the last time you heard the views of Uni-Lever, of Toyota, of Assicurazioni Generali, on anything at all? You only know the view of Stellantis (Fiat) on the current state of Brexit because they are likely to have to close their British factories on its account. But believe me, even if most business people and top executives were not, as they are, in favour of international agreements, they would have been against Brexit just because it was - what it was, after all, always intended to be - a spanner in the works.
Of course, a certain amount of rich people supported the abomination. Being rich does not mean being clever, or even being able to look after one's own interests; often, being born rich means only being able to indulge one's own idiot ideas and restricting one's social circle to people who think like you and people who depend on your money. (cf.Elon Musk.) Some poorly educated, over-moneyed persons may have thought... no, not thought - these people don't think. What is the appropriate verb? Believed? Perhaps. Imagined? Mmmaybe. Conceived? Perhaps. Dreamed? Well, in short, there was in their brains, however it got there, that the EU was an obstacle to business. In some cases, the irrational ideation is clear and visible. I am positive that Daniel, now Lord, Hannan, is not sane; his grand plan was to form a "league of English-speaking democracies" including Britain, the Dominions, the USA... and India! In other words, come back, British Empire, all is forgiven. But even minds less obviously deranged still bore nothing better than a jumble of daydream images of a trading empire built three to four centuries ago, when international agreements did not exist and most of the world did not have state organizations; of childhood memories - because few of them were adult before the Wilson referendum - and things they may have heard from the less intelligent of their older relatives; and of even more vague and absurd notions mediated from the worst Press in the free world. The notion that a country of sixty plus million could be turned into what they imagine Singapore to be was always a symptom of mental illness. It's the result of a rotten, destructive culture, created mainly in the addled pages of pornographic tabloids.
Almost all discussions of Brexit miss the elephant in the room, that is the British mass media. At this point, I don't want to speak about "the tabloids" alone, because, although Sun and Mail have been the core of the rot, the same culture has been spread across the board to the BBC, the "quality" press, and the periodicals. Brexit would never have been anything but the folkloric cult of a tiny deracinated minority, as its equivalents are in other European countries, if it had not been sold for decades by the leading press organs. Its promoters, the Cashes, the Rees-Moggs, the Farages, would never have amounted to anything - which of them does not have mediocrity and failure written on his face? - if the press had not boosted them boomed them, ballyhooed them - isn't it amazing how large is the English vocabulary for fraudulent press promotion? They would never have got even the most ignorant red wall voters to support them, since ignorant does not mean stupid, if those voters had not been made, down the decades, worse than ignorant; if they had not been stuffed, day after day, year after year, DECADE AFTER DECADE, with a constant, continuous, unrelenting diet of lies, intended and calculated to be poisonous, to catch and reinforce every tiny little shred of distrust and doubt about foreigners, to feed it, grow it, make it swell like a tumour till it spread over the mental horizon of Sun readers like a monster in a doomstay movie. It is even quite possible to say that this disaster would never have happened but for the unnatural longevity and health of one man, because all the steadfast and unrelenting campaign of hatred by The Sun and its appendages, promoted with single-minded purpose over more than fifty years, depended simply on Rupert Murdoch's hatred for the EU and its predecessors. Murdoch is now 91, and still making decisions and setting the directions for his empire. To judge by the Disney deal, he has lost none of his shrewdness and dishonesty. If he had died fifteen years ago, at the average age of death in the richest countries, the heart would have fallen out of the hate-Europe drive in 2008. You work it out.
The poisonous nature of the British press goes back to long before Murdoch was born, however. Its best denunciations come from people who were journalists themselves, in particular GK Chesterton, whose essay on "the yellow press", published in 1905, features many aspects of Daily Mail "journalism" that would be recognizable today. Since Chesterton, however, Britain has become used to the abnormal and horrible press it developed. Nothing shows that more clearly than the acceptance of some of the worst and most long-lived of its organs as part of the landscape, even as acceptable employer. It is by now a long time since I saw, to my disbelief, one of the great English writers of my time, Keith Waterhouse, bring himself to work for the Daily Mail. Yes, he hated what the so-called left was becoming in the days of Blair; and we may only thank the stars that he hasn't lived to see what it is now. But the fact that he could regard the Daily Mail as an apropriate place to take his respectable-working-class sensitivities to, that he took this monstrous organ as part of the landscape, just shows to what an extent degeneracy and manipulation have become the norm. To Chesterton, the power of the Mail and the press barons were an anomaly and a deformity, alien to the very nature of journalism; to Orwell, they were the hollow-minded hirelings of class interest, no more representative of the nature of journalism than a stormtrooper (or a Cheka thug) of that of politics. But to Waterhouse, the Mail was part of English life, not cancerous, not alien, not deformed or deforming. Or at least, not so much as to be more than a folkloric feature.
These groups, and others - one thinks of the faded but once appaling Beaverbrook group, whose Lord was even called to be part of Britain's government in the Second World War - have achieved a position of genuine monopoly, making it impossible for the public to be informed except through them. The number of national newspapers has decreased from decade to decade, till there was only one recognized newspaper for any one area of experience and belief - any one demographic, if you will. This is in effect a monopoly, much more effective than the one that totalitarian governments enforce, for each group is not only wrapped up tight in the hold of its own specific newspaper, but it does not even begin to think of the opportunity to open themselves to other views. Rupert Murdoch, in particular, was a positive wizard at this. He made his media a total experience, one in which his public could mentally exist without any need to reach outside.
Murdoch and Rothermere have managed the growing hate for the EU over decades, never letting up, and never allowing their readers to experience life beyond the party/paper barrier. To me, as a foreigner, the process had been clear since the eighties, and I often expressed my horror and my fear to English friends who always tended to pooh-pooh it and treat the everlasting tabloid hate campaign as something inconsequential, as a kind of silly folkloric bad habit with no real consequences. I was never convinced (having seen at home how a corrupting kind of media and political talk had given rise to murderous domestic terrorism simply because people believed its fantasies) and I was probably the only person in 2016 who, while horrified, was not in the least surprised. I'd seen it coming for decades.
What my friends still don't understand is that this is not about class interest or greed. Of course, once the revolution has taken place, the revolutionaries indulge their own private ambitions and greed, do business with each other, promote each other. That is the history of revolutionary politics since time out of mind. But the revolution was not made for the sake of the rich, most of whom did not want it and did not enjoy it.
It was the result of the infernal mechanism created by the media. There is a new word which, unlike many others, is a really good invention that defines something real and allows us to think about it in definite terms, which we did not have before it was invented: performative. This adjective, when dealing with politics, defines a kind of politics that is intended, not to achieve a range of actual and specific political, economic or social goals, but to supply the citizenry with an experience. Fascism, for instance, was performative: its ultimate goal was not to build a world military power, but to make the citizens feel part of a heroic uniformed army of virile adventurers, ever ready for risk and manly splendour. Putinism is performative in exactly the same way.
The most striking, one would say diagnostic, feature of performative politics, is the extraordinary way in which they fail when their attitudes are called upon to become reality. The world was astonished at how the legions of Mussolini, the armies of Putin, turned out to be not only mediocre but feeble, at how their plans turned out to be nonsense, at how they were literally made to look ridiculous by countries they dwarfed - Greece, Ukraine. In the same way, Brexitism has proved itself not only incompetent but ridiculous in all the fields in which it cast its performative daydreams.
Now the origins of Fascism and Putinism are not my business here, but the origin of Brexitism is. And once we realize that it is a classic kind of performative politics, offering not a plan but an attitude to be struck, then we understand where it comes from. The newspapers have created this mentality, this unreal world of hate and daydreams, for decades upon decades, till they themselves were caught in the infernal mechanism of unleashed unreality and performative aggression, and they had to walk all the way down the same road. They had to try and make their daydreams real, and, as with the testosterone dreams of fascism, they only ended up driving themselves and their followers in a collision course with reality.