Nick Cohen - Leavers are angry, for their lies will return to haunt them
The only thing worse
than sore losers are sore winners. They have the victory, the field is theirs,
but still they scream bitter abuse at the defeated.
The millions who know
that Brexit will shrink their world have every right to be angry. The young who
voted to remain because they wanted to learn, work and love where they choose,
without facing restrictions on which university they could study at and which
husband or wife they could bring home, have every right to be furious too. As
for EU immigrants in Britain and British immigrants in the EU, it is fair to
imagine them directing an emotion more intense than anger at the 17 million
people who took the cold-blooded decision to risk their future happiness.
Yet, instead of seeing
the losers’ anger, we are witnessing a novel and graceless phenomenon: victors’
rage. Supporters of Brexit shout about “enemies of the people” and denounce
“Remoaners” with all the venom of men and women who have lost rather than won
the biggest political struggle of their lives. They demand their opponents pass
loyalty tests, as if we were living in a dictatorship. They do not allow you to
say the referendum result betrayed our country’s best interests. They instruct
you to play the hypocrite and pretend to believe what you know to be untrue. Be
warned. Refuse to go along with the political correctness of the right and you
will feel “the people’s” wrath.
On its own, the Leave
campaigners’ victory makes the rage on the right appear baffling. But the
mystery does not end there. There is a faint but real possibility that a Greek
or Italian eurozone crisis, or a second wave of refugees, will vindicate their
desire to quit the union. Meanwhile, although the pound has fallen and real wages are shrinking, Remainers must
admit events have disproved their apocalyptic forecasts of recessions and
house-price crashes – for the time being at least.
Why in these
circumstances are Leavers angry? What the hell do they have to be angry about?
A part of the answer is that raging is all the poor dears can do. Across the
west, the populist right is as much a countercultural movement as a political
movement. Its supporters are closer to satirists than thinkers and doers with
practical plans to change society. The right feasts on undoubted hypocrisies
and evils in the liberal mainstream. It picks them apart and examines their
ghoulish contradictions. Like its counterparts on the left, it then rapidly
loses itself in the magic world of conspiracy theory. If you genuinely believe
a sinister force has organised 97% of climate scientists to lie about global warming, or Brussels has bribed economists across
the world to lie about the danger of Brexit, you are not just assuming mass
mendacity at an astonishing level. You are also assuming “the establishment” is
capable of the astonishing level of organisation required to persuade tens of
thousands to lie.
Paradoxically, Leavers
are the establishment’s greatest admirers. Unlike those of us who have seen
Britain’s shambling state at work, they believe it is capable of anything.
Naturally, they suspect “the establishment” is conspiring to overturn the
referendum result. This is why their pious exclamations about respecting the
will of “the people” never extend to granting “the people” the privilege of
changing its mind. No matter how bad the condition of Britain becomes, they
allowed us the one vote and that was that.
It is as if Nigel Farage,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove persuaded the British to abandon a familiar
route ahead and try their short cut to national greatness. The landscape
becomes menacing. The supposedly open road turns out to be tight and tortuous.
But as soon as the passengers begin to mutter about going back, the furious
demagogues of the right bellow that not only can they not turn the car round,
they cannot even stop for a vote on whether they should turn the car round. To
ask for a sensible reappraisal is to fall into the trap of an establishment
that is plotting to deceive us.
Even if they will not
allow us second thoughts, Britain’s Weimar culture of stab-in-the-back theories
will poison the wells for years hence. Treason and fear of the accusation of
treason fill the mental universe of the right.
You should not forget
that the referendum campaign had two Leave campaigns, which hated each other as
much as they hated their opponents. The official Vote Leave campaign wanted
nothing to do with Nigel Farage and Arron Banks, who they regarded as racists. Farage dismissed the Tories at Vote Leave as cretins. To outsiders, their
hatreds looked like distinctions without differences. Although Daniel Hannan and
other supposedly respectable Conservatives pretend they did not win by palming
the race card from the bottom of the deck, it is a matter of record that Vote
Leave began by promising a “positive” and “internationalist” vision and finished by
aping Ukip and warning that 76 million Turks were about to land at Dover.
Those inside the toxic
world of the right took notice of the frenzied accusations, however, and
learned how easily treason charges can be directed inwards. It is said that
Stalin killed his Bolshevik comrades because, after learning how to organise
one revolution against the tsar, he feared they could organise another against
him. Modern populists aren’t so different from old communists. They know there
are two scenarios for Brexit. The first is a compromise to avoid the economy
tumbling over a cliff. We already know Ukip and the Tory right will denounce as
a sellout any transitional arrangement that involves Britain still obeying the
European Court of Justice, still paying money to the EU and still accepting
freedom of movement.
But, and this is as
likely, suppose we go over the cliff. What will the right say to all those who
lose their jobs and businesses? You can already guess it will blame the Germans
and the French. We could have had a good deal, it will maintain as it pretends
the world owes us a living, but wicked foreigners connived against us. The
xenophobic fury will be cranked up so loud it will drown out an obvious
question, which must haunt the Leavers even now: does not responsibility for a
disaster lie with the men and women who have led us to disaster?
Why are the Leave
campaigners so angry? Because they fear the demagogic rage and charlatan tricks
they have used against others will one day be used against them.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/18/brexit-leavers-fear-their-lies-will-haunt-them
