gracchusdixit

“Bugger” is a coarse but expressive expletive the British sometimes use to describe situations that are simultaneously calamitous and comedic.  No word I can think of is better suited to describe the political fiasco the world has come to know as “Brexit,” which, as every day goes by, calls into further question the sanity of a nation once famous for its stolid common sense.

The insanity began two years ago, when, in what can only be called a fit of delusional pique, a slim majority of the British public voted to withdraw from the European Union.  As shocking as this electoral tantrum was to many, it did not come as a complete surprise to anyone who was paying attention.

The British (or at least the English, which is quite a different thing) have been suspicious of “The Continent” for centuries.  Once upon a time, England and France fought a Hundred Years’ War over the arcane question of whose king was supposed to bend his knee to whom. In the early 19th century, the British went all out to frustrate Napoleon’s ambition to unite all of Europe.  And in the 20th century, of course, Britain was drawn into two world wars to fend off dangers emanating from “The Continent”.

Thus, not all Brits were fully on board when their government decided to join the European Union in 1973.  There were those, who thought they could detect a whiff of old Boney in the whole thing, another attempt by the slippery French to slip one over on the trusting English.  There were others, who saw membership in the EU as a final, humiliating adieu to the glory days of their global empire.  And finally, there was a gaggle of ever-craven politicians, who saw the EU as a bogeyman to be exploited for purely partisan purposes.

The false promises and shameless fear-mongering of these politicians proved to be quite simply breathtaking.  They preyed upon public prejudices against immigrants, especially brown and black immigrants, by claiming that the fundamental “Englishness” of the nation was at risk.  They promised that Britain’s financial contributions to the EU would be plowed straight back into the beloved National Health Service, vastly inflating the amount of money involved.  They insinuated that, once freed from the shackles of EU regulations, the UK could somehow return to the grand days of its Victorian empire.  All nonsense, all utter rubbish, all designed to distract British voters from the real social and economic problems their country faces.

The forces behind all this are far-flung, of course, and, as Americans know all too well, Britain is far from being the only nation capable of succumbing to self-destructive political impulses.  Nevertheless, Brexit was, from the start, a characteristically British farce—and, in particular, an unintended consequence of Britain’s perverse and, to anyone not born into it, incomprehensibly peculiar class system.  

The idea of putting the question of EU membership to a popular vote was the brainstorm of the previous Tory prime minister, David Cameron.  Schooled at Eton and Oxford, Cameron is a quintessential member of the upper-class elite.  From his perch atop the social pyramid, he condescendingly assumed that ordinary working-class Brits would listen to their betters by rejecting Brexit as obvious folly.  His ploy turned out to be, as the Brits say, too clever by half, because the “lower classes” weren’t prepared to be condescended to.

They were, however, prepared to be hoodwinked.  All the while la-de-da David Cameron was trying to pull them in one direction, other la-de-da Tories were pushing them in another.  The pusher-in-chief, another product of Eton and Oxford, is a man with the name (you can’t make this up) Jacob Rees-Mogg and a mother whose middle name is Shakespeare.  Only in the airless atmosphere of the British upper class would such pomposity be greeted with anything other than sniggering derision.

As if such pretensions weren’t risible enough, Rees-Mogg and his fellow Brexiteers seem to believe that the clock can be turned back a couple of hundred years to a time when British buccaneers roamed the high seas in search of glory and plunder, if only they can become, once again, the “island people” they once were.  Not for nothing has Rees-Mogg been nicknamed “the Honourable Member for the 18th Century,” though it has never been entirely clear whether that sobriquet is intended as praise or parody.

There may be a charming dollop of Gilbert & Sullivan in the eccentricities of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg, but there is nothing at all charming about Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who has done more than anyone to stoke the fires of Brexit.  Murdoch is an Australian by birth, but he dominates the media landscape of the United Kingdom, controlling both the Times of London and The Sun, which are the quasi-official voices of, respectively,  the ruling class and the working class.

The United Kingdom has a long history of foreigners using media ownership to buy their way into the upper echelons of the British society.  The Canadian-born newspaper baron, Max Aitken, for example, became one of Churchill’s greatest pals, was awarded the title “Lord Beaverbrook,” and thereby occupied a seat in the House of Lords.  

Rupert Murdoch chose a different path.  Although he graduated from Oxford, has hobnobbed with every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, and is acknowledged to be the most powerful unelected person in the land, Murdoch has, like his father before him, used his media empire to vilify the British aristocracy and the monarchy, in particular.   It is impossible to know how much of Murdoch’s animus results from calculated self-interest (attacking the swells reliably sells newspapers) or from snubs he may have received along the way.  Whatever the cause, it is abundantly clear that Murdoch’s vendetta against the EU is, on some level, a way of getting back at the British establishment.

The European Union, it must be said, has real and substantive problems.  Its governing institutions are a long way from being fully democratic; its economic policies are controlled by high-minded and penny-pinching Germans; and its regulatory bureaucracy is populated by sometimes heavy-handed French officials.  Some would call this congeries of qualities the worst of all possible worlds, and they would not be entirely wrong.

The EU’s critics are worse than wrong, however, in their refusal to acknowledge all the good that it has accomplished, not the least of which is bringing an unprecedented era of peace, prosperity, and shared purpose to a continent previously wracked by division, conflict, and war.  Not since the days of the Roman Empire have Europeans had been so able to experience and celebrate their common culture and civilization.

What’s more, those who claim that Britain surrendered its sovereignty by joining the EU and got nothing in return are simply lying.  If that were in fact the case, Brexit wouldn’t even be on the table.  And far from getting nothing, the UK got a sweetheart of a deal.   

Even though the UK never adopted the euro, “The City”—namely, the financial industry that dominates the British economy—was allowed to operate as the major exchange for trading the euro on the world’s currency markets.  This cemented London’s place as the epicenter of global finance and lined the pockets of its bankers.  The UK was also given a host of exemptions from EU rules, enabling it to trade at will with Commonwealth nations like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. 

None of this, alas, has been enough to assuage a large swath of the skeptical British public, satisfy the rowdy Tories who populate the back benches of Parliament, or stymie the upper-crust toffs who stirred up this storm in the first place.  Now, they, and the people they pretend to represent, are going to have to live with the calamitous consequences.

Bugger!