“Not in my name” Or “we can stop this” ?
Perhaps the framing of
an issue of almost unprecedented importance in terms of arcana shouldn’t be too
much of a surprise. At the start of this whole saga, let us not forget, the
official remain campaign could bring itself to say little more stirring about
the prospect of leaving the EU than the warning that people would be “£38 a week” worse off and that house prices would fall by “10 to
18%”. And so it has gone on. Brexit demands to be debated in the most
fundamental terms – but England being England, it is too often reduced to the
political equivalent of small talk.
That said, recent(ish)
history has had no end of political causes that attracted an altogether more
passionate response, from the struggle against the far-right upsurge of the
late 1970s, through massed shows of support for CND and the miners’ strike, to
the poll tax riot of 1990 – the last time that street-level
politics forced a change of government policy, and an event I heard a few
people muttering about on the people’s vote march. Thirty years on, we face the
final completion of a Tory project started back then, and the recasting of
Britain – or, rather England – as a crabby, racist, inward-looking hole, and to
what response? Jokes, mutterings, clicks, sporadic Twitterstorms, but nothing
remotely comparable.
Some of the
explanation lies in two missing actors in this drama: the Labour leadership –
and, with one or two exceptions, big voices in what is left of the trade union
movement. But there are also even bigger forces in play. Forty years of
post-Thatcher individualism have done their work, so that protest is now not a
matter of collective agency (in other words, “we can stop this”), but the kind
of atomised conscience-salving I first glimpsed at the time of the Iraq war,
with the appearance of that deathly slogan “Not in my name”. .. read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/01/petitions-jokes-halt-brexit-calamity-brexit-english
