The pencil and the mouse - Village Magazine

6 6 July 2016

or nearly 20 years before his death in 1989, my

father, who left school at 11 and drove a mail-

car for a living, railed against the undemocratic

evil of the European Thing. He brought me to

understand that its operation depended on

replacing intelligent politicians with stupid ones for the

purpose of absolute control – the mechanism operat-

ing to lift from the shoulders of politicians all

requirement for thought, vision, creativity or foresight,

providing them with the wherewithal to enable their

countries to function after a fashion for as long as they

do what they are told. Once the transfer of sovereignty

is achieved, he said, anyone can run a country. Hence,

Enda Kenny.

The world catches up – slowly. For sure: our former

nations, even our former empires, have now become as

dependent on the bureaucratic girdle of the EU as, in

the years of the Iron Curtain, were the peoples of the

former communist satellites in Czechoslovakia and

Poland on the Soviet apparatus. We know no other way

of being, never mind living. Both as an upshot and a

driving factor, we are nowadays incapable of producing

anything other than functionaries and middle-manag-

ers whose odd admixture of timidity and egomania

allows them to become mini-dictators in their own

countries, implementing the will of their foreign mas-

ters. Just don’t ask them to pronounce an original

thought, a vision of independence or a promise of

self-realisation.

One thing that we have gleaned from Brexit is that,

almost for certain, there are no grown-ups left in Brit-

ish politics. There are boys, and certainly one or two

girls, but no adults. The daily tableau of happenings is

like a series of scenes from a tale written by Frank Rich-

ards: a story with a constant tumble of intricate twists

arising from the ﬂaws of its cast of hapless and villain-

ous anti-heroes: the toffy-nosed school captain done

down by the incompetent scheming of the Fat Owl of

the Remove; the Fat Owl in turn done down by the

beasts and bounders of the lower fourth.

But Theresa may. She may yet emerge as the only one

capable of looking convincing in long trousers.

We move ever closer to Alexander Mitscherlich’s

prophecy of a mass society stripped of responsibility,

where everyone’s a sibling, looking sideways, waiting

to be fed, and there are no adults left to lead the people

back on to the vertical path from history to the future.

No one looks up to the top of the stairs, because there

is no one there to see.

In 1975, when the UK last held a referendum on mem-

bership of the European ‘Thing’, it was mainly

left-wingers like Michael Foot and Tony Benn (labelled,

interestingly, the ‘Minister for Fear’ by the Daily Mirror)

who opposed it. The result was two-to-one in favour of

The pencil

and the mouse

As democracy and the common good break

down, expect a Brexit re-vote

by John Waters

BREXIT

'Conservative' and 'reactionary'

nowadays imply that there is

a certain rightness which is

being denied, they invoke a set

of pre-programmed demonic

descriptions – almost in the

nature of hypnosis – with which

to detonate an explosion of

disapproval

July 2016 6 7

remaining in what was then called the Common

Market. There were many interesting similari-

ties and contrasts between that contest and the

recent one, but one thing that has to be said is

that the calibre of leader available to Britain at

that time – on both sides of the argument – was

inﬁnitely greater than it is now.

It has gradually become clear that most of

those advocating the Leave position did not

want to win. Boris Johnson played a faux popu-

list tune in which he didn't actually believe. He

may well have been the most dismayed of all,

having hoped for a narrow defeat. The main pur-

pose in his elbowing in was to deny Nigel Farage

the mileage to be gained from winning or losing

narrowly. As the polls closed, he was predicting

a narrow win for Remain. In the immediate after-

math of the result, faced with having to step up

to cope with all the fallout, you could see his

chagrin and confusion. “It was just a lark”, he

seemed to say, “why take things so seriously?”.

It was no surprise when he jumped at the ﬁrst

excuse to cop out altogether. Farage duly fol-

lowed shortly afterwards.

Michael Gove is far worse, a man utterly with

out qualities, run by his appalling wife. He was

the first politician I ever registered who

believes, “We have to get over our obsession

with biological parenthood”. He was sleeping,

clearly anticipating defeat with an easy con-

science, when they called him to say that his

side had won.

I had the feeling from the start about the Vote

Leave campaign that they were a bunch ran-

domly picked to make a case they didn't believe

in. Boris et al seemed simply to parrot off-the-

peg populist arguments in a manner designed

to sound convincing to the hoi polloi but without

conviction, as though the Brexit campaign was

intended as a controlled explosion of Euroscep-

ticism – a managed letting off of the known

negativity but in a manner as to ensure that, no

matter how it went, the situation would be

steered back on course and the Tories would be

the victors. Nigel would be bypassed, Cameron

would if necessary fall on his sword. But both

sides of the argument would be controlled by

essentially the same forces.

This result was a long time coming. Avoid-

ance by those whose duty it was to do otherwise

pushed the UK’s demographic and cultural

nightmare under the carpet, making the pre-

sent moment all but inevitable. Nigel Farage

erupted from the resulting silence, propelled

into the public arena by virtue of media bullying

and the cowardice of mainstream politicians,

who emitted mixed and coded signals about

immigration because they knew it concerned a

lot of people but remained a dodgy topic under

PC rules.

Fifteen months ago, I wrote: “There's some-

thing slightly too obvious about him – like a

poorly drafted comic character in 'EastEnders',

a likely lad with an over-developed patter and

excessively large lapels. Farage says wholly

predictable things in a wholly foreseeable way,

but he represented something of the sup-

pressed feelings of Britain’s uneasy gut, and

the studied condescension he attracted from

the media was the most reliable indicator of his

signiﬁcance. The straight vote system will prob

ably do for UKIP this time, but Nigel is a

precursor to something we will see a great deal

more of, there and here”. It remains to be seen

if his retirement endures.

Another thing we learned in the referendum

aftermath is that the commitment of the elites

of both Britain and Ireland to the much lip-ser-

viced resource of democracy is no more than

lipgloss-deep. Democracy was not merely con-

signed to a back seat – it was tied up, gagged,

wrapped from head to toe in bubblewrap and

bundled into the boot.

In the British ‘liberal’ press, we have been

subjected to articles assuring us that parlia

ment had voted to have the referendum and

could therefore vote to ignore it. In the days fol-

lowing the result, experts discovered something

they hadn’t mentioned before: that the (unwrit-

ten) British constitution makes no provision for

referendums – the people should speak

through their elected representatives only. A

Labour Party MP declared the referendum

merely ‘indicative’. The distinguished diplomat

Jonathan Powell said the vote of the people

should not be the “last word”. Lawyers have

been trotted out to tell us that, indeed, the deci-

sion of the people ‘might be unlawful’. No less

a personage than Sir Richard Branson called on

parliament to take a second look at the result.

Is there really something

wrong with wanting your

country back? What

are countries if not the

birthright of those who

were born in them?

The virtual is not the real, especially in the city

6 8 July 2016

Tony Blair said a second referendum should not be

ruled out. The Guardian sent its reporter into the Welsh

wilderness to count the EU handouts to villages which

had had the effrontery to vote Leave. Thousands of pro-

testors marched on the Houses of Parliament in London

protesting at the outcome: people ‘out there’ were

daring to tell Londoners how things should go! One

such protest was “organised on social media” by a

comedian who wanted to express his “anger, frustra-

tion and need to do something”. On that march, the pop

singer Jarvis Cocker held up a placard adorned with a

map of the world and the question: “You cannot deny

geography. The UK is in Europe. How can you take it

out?”. Nobody pointed out to Jarvis that what had

occurred was a referendum on Britain’s place in the EU,

not its place in Europe, which remains secure – the

same Europe that includes the non-EU territories of

Russia, Switzerland, Norway, Bosnia-Herzegovina,

Serbia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Ukraine, Mol

dova, Belarus, Iceland and a small slice of Turkey.

Although 52 per cent of the UK's population had

made a clear statement of intent and desire, the cover-

age and commentary which followed was 98 per cent

hostile, scathing and ultimately dismissive. Democracy

had worked in an unacceptable manner and therefore

had to be put in reverse. Scotland would secede, maybe

Northern Ireland too, possibly even London. Northern

Ireland might consider joining the Republic!

Virtually everything was discussed except the dismal

record of non-democracy which led to this moment like

a snail's trail through sand. The elites had been deﬁed,

cheeked, by those who had previously acquiesced in

their cannon-fodder function and now seemed to think

themselves entitled to use their votes to throw the plans

and strategies of the elite back in its face. Well, we

would have to see about that!

The virus quickly crossed the Irish Sea. Gene Kerri-

gan, writing in the Sunday Independent, reﬂected on

the demographics of Leave voters: “The old, those least

likely to have a passport, to know anything about any-

where beyond their own narrow borders, wanting their

country back”.

But is there really something wrong with wanting

your country back? What are countries if not the birth-

right of those who were born in them, those who live in

them, who built their cultures and civilisations? What

else might a country be? The idea that there is some-

thing morally awry in ‘wanting your country back’ is a

ﬁgment of

political cor-

rectness called

up in the service of

global capital, which

seeks to insinuate a uni

versal placelessness to render

the entire globe safe for its dominion.

I’m being deliberately obtuse: the construction

‘wanting your country back’ is, of course, a coded accu-

sation of racism – the handy reﬂex of lazy commentators

seeking to bait a mob and raise a cheap cheer.

More disappointingly, in the same newspaper, the

usually judicious Eoghan Harris had this to say: “A chart

circulating on social media among younger Britons cal-

culates how long, on average, each generation will have

to live with this reactionary result. The 18-24 age group,

75 percent of whom voted to Remain, will, on average,

have to live for a long 69 years with the regressive ref-

erendum decision. But those over 65, some 61percent

of whom voted Leave, will, again on average, only have

to live with their selﬁsh decision for 16 years. Although

I am in that same age category, I am tempted to add

‘and a good thing, too’. Because this bunch of fearful

old farts has made the future of their grandchildren

more fraught than it needed to be. What are they fear-

ful about? Immigration. The inﬂux of workers who will

staff the health service and look after them in old age”.

In the future, then, perhaps a vote needs to be issued

with an accompanying algorithm by which its diminish-

ing value may be calculated over time? An 18-year-old’s

vote will have maximum value, a 90-year-old fart’s

practically nil. But where will this leave the monuments

of unageing intellect? And is not the demographic crisis

to which Eoghan Harris alludes in that last sentence not

a function of precisely the skewed policies that have

dominated the European Community over the past four

decades: pro-business, anti-family policies which

drove women out of the home and forced the birthrate

down? Now they propose that Syrians will ﬁll the

BREXIT

A Sky survey found the percentage of 18-25 year-

olds who planned to vote was 36%; of over-65s,

83%. Young people, it seems, like to tweet, post,

comment, ‘like’ and the like, but need the incentive

of a fashionable issue, and possibly a few celebrity

gee-ups, to get them down to the polling booths

July 2016 6 9

ﬁnancial holes left by this unconscious stab at

self-annihilation.

Gradually, our public discourse reduces

towards oblivion, bypassing reason and logic

as it goes. Eoghan Harris went on: “Just because

we got the right result on same-sex marriage

does not mean that referendums are the right

way to decide contentious matters in a parlia-

mentary democracy”. In other words, the

people are to be regarded as trustworthy when

they deliver the ‘right’ answer and afﬁrm the

demands of the elites, but otherwise must keep

their peace.

Under the attrition of the conditions my

father predicted, the former nations of Europe

move inexorably towards oligarchy. Our

'democracies' are now constructed in

such a way as to impose the will of the

true 'governments' at all times regard-

less of the fact that approximately half

of all populations do not agree, are not

represented and have no right to be

listened to. “The howls of despair that

have greeted this result from the

elites on the losing side”, wrote David

Runciman, professor of politics at Trin-

ity College Cambridge, in the July

edition of Prospect, “is a sign of how

rare it is that they ﬁnd their interests

genuinely challenged by the democratic

process”.

The elitism we sometimes speak of in a

manner we imagine to be rhetorical has

moved even beyond our paranoia. Elections

and referendums are retained purely for

show. In general it is hoped that the media and

parliamentary quasi-consensus will be sufﬁ-

cient to ensure that the verisimilitude of

democracy is preserved while the 'right' out-

come is always guaranteed. This has come

unstuck with Brexit, and so, with a nod to Lord

Denning , the British elites are presented with

such an appalling vista that every sensible

person in the land would say that it cannot be

right that the wrong answer be allowed to stand

– even if, as a consequence, they risk exposing

the existence and mechanics of the

pseudo-democracy.

When you factor out Scotland and Northern

Ireland – two entities best described as

addicted to subvention – the picture you get of

England and Wales is the cities and large towns

voting to Remain and the rest voting over-

whelmingly to Leave. The priggish but

predictable analysis that those who voted for

Brexit were uneducated, doddery dupes from

the countryside who had never ventured

beyond Britain goes down well with the self-

important readers of liberal newspapers, but it

is, apart from being insulting, a distortion of

what has actually happened. The divide is not

between educated and uneducated, or between

young and old: it is between those who are

more deeply engaged with their society at the

most fundamental level and those who simply

trot along on top, barely making contact with

the ground they travel on. “Some younger

voters”, David Runciman wrote in Prospect,

“have complained that the older generation,

who are going to be dead soon, shouldn’t be

allowed to set the terms for a world they won’t

inhabit. This is grotesque and unfair. Older

people care about the future, including for their

children and grandchildren, just as much (per-

haps even more) than the younger generations

do. It’s simply that they don’t like what they

see”.

Education, then, becomes a loaded word. In

a certain light it is ungainsayable that Remain

sentiment tended to dominate among the more

schooled and diplomaed elements of society.

But does a doctorate in social media or gender

theory amount to evidence of an education? Can

it be said that a watchmaker who has served for

ﬁve decades in his craft remains, as it were,

uneducated?

In one rather superﬁcially axiomatic sense,

Brexit was the unexpected expression of a sup-

pressed democratic sentiment: the older

voters, those who work hard but are not rich,

those who continue to think and observe, those

who read their news on paper, those who are

free from the propagandist deluge of the BBC,

Guardian, Facebook, Twitter etc - all ﬁnally

saying, 'Enough! No more!! Please, listen to

what we are saying, please respect us and our

lives and our thoughts also!'. The media, now

desperate in the face of extinction, trying to

limit the damage of their own fraudulence, seek

to revise and reduce the meaning of these

events with terms like 'Little Englanders', 'xeno-

phobia', 'rightwing' etc., when what is

happening is in large part a refusal of media

bullying and manipulation, precisely of their

own refusal to allow the discussions they are

there to provide for.

Terms like 'right wing' (in the Guardian it has

become one word), 'conservative' and 'reaction-

ary' nowadays have meanings only of an

ideological nature. These words imply that

there is a certain rightness which is being

denied or frustrated, and there ought to be no

space for such dissent. Their use is designed

not to explain anything but to invoke a set of

pre-programmed demonic descriptions –

almost in the nature of hypnosis – with which

to detonate an explosion of disapproval calcu-

lated to dispose of truth and common sense

('right wing'/'conservative') and protect in a

manner immune from scrutiny all that is oppor-

tunistic and false ('progressive'/'leftwing').

When these words are uttered now, almost no

one actually encounters or is prompted to a

thought, but most feel themselves stung as

though by a cattle prod or an electric fence,

thereby experiencing a kind of shame which in

the vast majority of cases is sufﬁcient to cause

an immediate falling into line. Newspapers have

become ragmags issuing shrill demands that

the world be reconstructed in accordance with

a new and untested blueprint. Radio and TV pro-

grammes are not intended as arenas of

discussion but are more in the way of public

trials of thoughts and behaviours, courts of

political correctness, the statute of the cultural

nihilism that has become the unholy writ of the

new virtual world.

Some inconvenient facts for the beneﬁt of

commentators: a Sky survey found that, based

on the advance expression of intent, the per-

centage of 18-25 year-olds who planned to vote

In the city, it is not

necessary to know your

neighbour’s name, and so

it becomes easier to hold

to abstract beliefs about

things like multiculturalism

and diversity and rights and

freedom. Multiculturalism

appears to work in cities.

But not in villages or valleys.

7 0 July 2016

on the issue which was afterward to exercise them so

dramatically was… 36, slightly more than one in three.

The percentage of over-65s who intended voting was

83. The ﬁgure for 25-34 year-old was 58%; that for

55-64 year-olds 81%. These numbers were based on

people who said they were certain to vote and had done

so in the past. Data extracted from the actual results

by the various media groups – Guardian, Telegraph, FT

and BBC – tended to conﬁrm

these projections, bearing out

that areas with older popula

tions had much higher turnouts

than those with younger

demographics.

Ten days after the result,

there was a pointed attempt to

suggest that the turnout among

younger voters had been much

higher than these projections

calculated. An article in the

Observer, ‘Poll reveals young

Remain voters reduced to tears

by Brexit result’ suggested that

"almost half" of voters aged

18-39 had "cried or felt like crying" when they heard the

result, and that the poll found turnout among young

people to be "far higher than data has so far sug-

gested". The poll, organised by the London School of

Economics, seemed to be addressed more towards

gleaning and highlighting an emotional response than

verifying precise turnout ﬁgures, but still its organisers

dropped in the claim that they had found that young

people voted at much higher rates than previously

believed. "Young people cared and voted in very

large numbers", a spokesperson for the poll-

sters told the Observer. "We found turnout was

very close to the national average, and much

higher than in general and local elections".

There was, however, a curiously unscien-

tiﬁc air about the presentation of the

results. Aside from the emphasis on the

emotional responses, there was the odd

conflation in the report of the term

‘Remain supporters’ and ‘voters’.

The poll also avoided looking at the con-

ventions categories – 18-24 and 24-34,

instead opting to stretch the concept of

‘young people’ to its furthest reaches – ﬁrst-

time voters to 40 year-olds.

And then there was this rather vague inter-

vention: "After correcting for over-reporting

[people always say they vote more than they do],

we found that the likely turnout of 18- to 24-year-

olds was 70% – just 2.5% below the national

average – and 67% for 25- to

29-year-olds".

This is remarkable: ﬁrstly for the fact

that the number of people who claim to

have voted is almost twice the ﬁgure

indicating intention-to-vote, and sec-

ondly because the ﬁgure is actually

lower in the older category. There

is also the fact that, if the LSE

ﬁgure is correct, the turnout would have had to be per-

haps 76 0r 77% overall. The total truth is that,

overwhemingly, Leave supporters voted in signiﬁcantly

greater numbers to those who said they wanted to

Remain.

The true pattern is remarkably similar to those which

emerged from our own recent general election. Young

people, it seems, like to tweet, post, comment, ‘like’

and the like, but need the incentive of a fashionable

issue, and possibly a few celebrity gee-ups, to get them

down to the polling booths.

We observe yet again a manifestation of Jean Baudril

lard’s concept of the ‘Unrepresentable’: “What interest

does the modern individual have in being represented

– the individual of the networks and the virtual, the

multifocal individual of the operational sphere? He

does his business, and that is that”.

The post-Brexit map-charts conﬁrmed once again

that the locus of this unrepresentability is overwhelm-

ingly in the cities, which now seek to force the remainder

of the world into their way of being and seeing.

Cities have always been essentially parasitical. Tra-

ditionally, they were necessary hubs, deriving their life

from the productive labours of their hinterlands, pro-

viding markets, services and government but

contributing little to the sustainable productivity of

BREXIT

Cities have moved

towards fragmentation

and diversiﬁcation, a

marketplace of rights

and wants and attitudes

and demands rather

than a community of

mutuality, promoting the

common good

Girl

July 2016 7 1

their societies. Cities do not feed themselves.

In modern times, the word ‘market’ has become

corrupted out of all recognition, denoting a

place where money is played with in a mockery

of economic activity. Indeed, the word ‘city’ has

itself come to signify something other than the

exuberance of humanity it once summoned up:

a nest of stock-jobbers skimming pseudo-

wealth from the tokens of real trade.

The city speaks of risk and sex, but also of

avoidance. Its inhabitants do not know where

their life comes from, do not even recognise the

validity of the question. It seems obvious: life

is everywhere, why bother asking? But the life

of the city is that of the peel rather than the

fruit. Still, the city imagines itself the fruit. It

preens and ﬂatters itself and hogs the resources

that are diverted its way to claim that its muniﬁ-

cence is what makes the world turn.

Never was this tendency of the city more

explicit or more dangerous that in the postmod-

ern age of networks, technocracy and

virtualism.

The postmodern city forgets that it merely

supposed to be a conduit for money and power,

and insists on claiming what passes through it

as its own, even though it is intended to be

merely a pump to disperse the beneﬁts of eco-

nomic life to the peripheries and the heartlands.

The modern metropolis is no longer a crown on

its own nation, but a satellite of the global, a

colonising force within its own borders, a

cuckoo in the nest that is now permitted to

belong to no one.

If Europe had been run from its villages, there

would have been no crash of 2008. The city

lives off tips and taxes. It gives back value in all

kinds of ways, but it is not, of its nature, produc-

tive. Its inhabitants, therefore, do not require

to look fundamentally at things in the way that

people in the countryside must if they are to

survive at all. In the city, it is not necessary to

know your neighbour’s name, and so it becomes

easier to hold to abstract beliefs about things

like multiculturalism and diversity and rights

and freedom. In the country, it is necessary to

be aware of the ecology of community life and

the delicate balance of economic forces. The

countryside and its villages survive by sweat

and strength – physical risk. The modern city

shifts money around, turning tricks, adding

halfpence to the pence.

What is called multiculturalism works, or

appears to work, in cities. But it does not work

in villages or valleys. It is easy in the city to pre-

tend to progressive values which cost you

nothing, while you go about the place avoiding

eye contact with your fellow citizens. Just as

villages have to create the means of their own

survival, their inhabitants need to face, on a

daily basis, the actual reality in which they must

live. A streetscape can be walked or driven

through indifferently: it invites no sense of

responsibility, threatens no ecological back

lash to those who ignore or disrespect it. But

ﬁelds and true marketplaces make demands of

those who live beside and by them. Their life

speaks loudly of consequences, costs and

limits in a way the city manages to conceal or

elide.

A parochial community possesses a balance

utterly different to that of a metropolitan neigh-

bourhood. The idea of a host community is vital

to the former, but relatively unimportant to the

latter. If you see a street as simply someplace

to move through, it doesn’t really matter who

inhabits it. In the city, I can privatise myself, so

that nothing bothers me about my environment

except what I choose to see and engage with. I

don’t have this luxury in the countryside or the

sráidbhaile, where the encroachment of the

alien can represent a fundamental threat to the

survival of the host community.

Progressivism, which emerges from the city,

is like this also. It affects attitudes and posi-

tions which pass their costs on to the innocent

and unknowing: to the breadwinner seeking to

live by the market he has constructed, to the

child in the womb waiting for the light of life; to

the left-behind parent before the family court;

to the brown-skinned poverty-stricken woman

whose womb is treated as an oven for someone

else’s fantasies. This is really why what is called

‘conservatism’ is associated with the country-

side: because the countryside is unforgiving of

those who seek to live lies, shrug off responsi-

bility and ignore consequences.

Cities need not necessarily have become cor-

rupted to this extent. Civic life implies a

togetherness that involves, to a high degree,

the eschewing of individuality in the interests

of solidarity and communal well-being. But,

under the inﬂuence of consumerist ideologies,

our public realms have headed full tilt in the

opposite direction: towards increasing frag

mentation and diversiﬁcation, a marketplace of

rights and wants and attitudes and demands

rather than a community of mutuality. One of

the symptoms of this is that it is becoming

increasingly difﬁcult to persuade an electorate

of the idea of a common good, a concept that

seems dull and reactionary compared to the

claim of some exotic grouping wishing to

achieve its objective or vindicate its theories

while prohibiting discussion of the broader

impact. Younger people in particular, swamped

by propaganda, just don’t seem to grasp the

idea of a politics directed at the common good,

but only as either a spectacle to be enjoyed or

a mechanism or market for delivering demands.

David Runciman almost nailed it: “The digital

revolution has opened up the prospect of a

future in which knowledge is the primary cur-

rency, connectivity the primary asset, and

physical geography is at best a secondary con-

cern. People who are rooted in particular

places, who work in industries that produce

physical goods, and whose essential social

interactions do not happen online are the ones

who wanted Out. They have glimpsed a future

in which people like them are increasingly at the

mercy of forces beyond their power to control.

And they are right”.

But Runciman, while celebrating the fact that

ﬂesh-and-blood people “still have the power to

surprise faceless networks”, appears to argue

that the virtual model is indeed ultimately sus-

tainable. Yet, he fails to look to the source of its

life, which is in the accumulating debt which

weighs down every ‘modern’ society in the

world. “‘The problem is that virtual people and

a virtual economy, built around network effects

and tradable knowledge, can escape the

bounds that national politics tries to set for

them”, he writes. “Many on the losing side in

this referendum possess the resources for navi-

gating a networked world that those on the

winning side tend to lack. And that’s how the

‘Remainers’ can, and will, bypass the result”.

For a time, yes. But ultimately the bills will

come through the digital letterbox and plop on

the virtual doormat. The juggler cannot keep

all his balls airborne for ever: either he recalls

them carefully to earth or they go tumbling and

ricocheting all over the place. Brexit may not

hold right now, may succumb to the corruption

of the oligarchy, but it will, yes, remain, a proph-

ecy of the restoration of what is, after all, a

natural order.

Meanwhile, the result has laid bare the true

nature of the divides in our modern societies,

as well as the hypocrisies that guard them from

scrutiny. The divides are not really, as David

Runciman correctly diagnoses, between old

and young, traditionalists and progressives,

left and right, or even, in the old sense, between

metropolitans and rednecks. The divide can be

tracked in terms of wealth and privilege, but

that can lead us into an ideological cul de sac.

Younger people in particular,

swamped by propaganda,

just don’t seem to grasp the

idea of a politics directed at

the common good, but only

as either a spectacle to be

enjoyed or a mechanism

or market for delivering

demands

7 2 July 2016

BREXIT

Deep down, they are divides between those who are

committed to the concrete and those who have grown

up thinking that the virtual is the only true kind of

reality. And it is a measure of the intellectual

disintegration of our cultures that it is the

concrete that is being left behind, that

the thinking elements of our socie-

ties appear to hold that a virtual

world based on debt and

babble is sustainable in the

long term. In the wake of

Brexit, we can observe,

again, the two kinds of

unrepresentability: those

who refuse to be represented

because they cannot see the

point of politics, and those whose

appeals to the political process are ignored

in favour of those who decline to become engaged. This

is what the EU has fostered - with faux benevolence,

passive aggression but most of all with boredom.

But the most crystal-clear divide of all exposed by

the Brexit referendum and its

aftermath is that between

the pencil and the mouse,

the real as opposed to the

virtual, The People as

opposed to the Unrepresent-

able. The pencil, the

implement with which the

damage was done, has dig-

nity, backbone, sharpness,

renewability, correctability,

an internal life that is both

softer than its exterior and

also capable of making a dis-

cernible and enduring mark.

The pencil’s function deﬁned

by the paper at which it is

directed, wood and lead

making love to the real world;

it does not operate in abstraction.

The mouse, on the other hand, is well named: its user

cowers behind a screen, manipulating his or her avatar

in a virtual world, becoming more and more terriﬁed of

– and hostile to – actually existing reality.

The Brexit vote, seen from this perspective, was a

probably doomed attempt at a wake-up call. Although

the message was directed primary at the ‘national’

elites, it has a certain undertone intended for the EU,

since it is the EU which has appeared to supplant the

indigenous powers and capacities of our nations. And

of course it’s true that, whereas Remain was a simple

idea (stay in), Leave was a multiplicity of possibilities,

most of them unformulated. The vote was, in this con-

text, a blurt of rage and desperation – the villages

answering back, in harmony with the dales, the fens,

the valleys.

It was most of all a striking out at those who con-

stantly devolve their loyalty upwards in attempts to

evade reality: the anger of those whose lives rooted in

the real have been supplanted and derided by an unsus-

tainable virtualism with its feet in the iCloud.

Communities which once lived off the iron and coal

their menfolk hacked from the underground rendered

mendicant by an economy based on nothing but money

created ex nihilo without beneﬁt of priesthood –

answering back.

The Leave vote was therefore as much a shot in the

air as it was a reasoned plea to stop the nonsense and

restore Britain to some degree of transparent self-sus-

taining coherence. In Wales, voters were reminded by

the Remain campaigners that the EU gave £79 to every

Welsh citizen every year. The problem with people who

say things like this is that they haven’t a bull’s clue what

the problem is: human dignity depends on being inde-

pendent. The income of the average Welsh worker is

42% of that of the average Londoner. For this it is de

rigueur to blame Margaret Thatcher, who for sure laid

waste to Britain’s indigenous industrial base, but

Labour, in power for 14 of the past 19 years, did nothing

but formulate false promises and allow things to grow

worse. A persistent failure to invest in the future has

rendered the UK increasingly dependent on the ‘splash’

of the global economy –

rather than its own

indigenous resources.

Meanwhile, increasing

immigration forces down

the rate for what work there

is in many places; people

who instinctively think of

themselves as workers are

now bystanders and specta-

tors on an economy that

seems no longer cotermi

nous with the life of their

communities. Their villages

and towns are dotted with

takeaways, bookies, charity

stores and poundshops

(‘Poundshopland’ having

become, after the Brexit

vote, one of the favoured taunts of the metropolitan

elites).

But still, Richard Branson will have his way – in dem-

ocratic terms an outrage but in reality the only safe or

sane option. There is every probability that, come Octo-

ber, the elites will have established the conditions for

another referendum and whoever is pretending to run

things by then will be only too happy to agree this in

return for a renegotiated relationship with ‘Europe’ that

will fall short of Brexit.

The alternative would be worse than Jarvis Cocker is

capable of dreaming. The UK that subsists after more

than 40 years of subservience to bureaucracy, its qual-

ity of leadership diluted beyond reversal, is now at least

as incapable of self-government as we are. It therefore

doesn’t matter who becomes its next prime minister.

We could swap them Enda for Boris and Theresa and it

would make no difference to either country. The world

now churns around without reference to those whose

faces continue to grin down at us from poles as immi-

nently obsolete as themselves.

Deep down, they are

divides between those

who are committed to the

concrete and those who

have grown up thinking

that the virtual is the only

true kind of reality

July 2016 7 3

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(photograph by the late Christopher Robson)