• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • Articles
  • Blog
  • About
  • Contribute
  • Contact

Sceptical Scot

Asking Questions. Seeking Answers.

You are here: Home / Articles / Brexit, the people and the politics of loss

Brexit, the people and the politics of loss

March 26, 2019 by Christopher Silver 4 Comments

Where does the mind of the prime minister wander to when what little sleep she is afforded just refuses to arrive?

Is there an essential place, a composite of some abstract idea of what Britain is and who the British are, where her thoughts come to rest? 

Their lives so different, their smell so strange, their concerns so vapid compared to those of high office. What do they do? She ponders. But she knows that question is too frail to linger. The people want something done. And she is the doer in chief — the expression of their pragmatism, their will to muddle on, their inarticulate sense of duty. 

Perhaps May wishes she could wander out into the gloaming incognito, like Shakespeare’s King Harry before Agincourt, and find out what the people really think in order to return to her tent with some harsh truths and burning new purpose for the next morning.But hers is a task more terrible than trying to gub the overweening French with a few stout yeomen. The task is impossible: to make something fit the British constitution with a concept (popular sovereignty) that it evolved in opposition to.

Chasm of incomprehension

Politicians, successful ones at least, learn to be adept at roving amongst the people. The most skilled paint an authentic impression that they’d gladly do so all day. But the gulf has never been so palpable as it is in these strange listless days of crisis and collapse. Here is a haunted woman whose every fibre seems to scream to be left alone, to be off in the hills, the embodiment of that great British mantra: anything for a quiet life. 

Partly because of this desire to be left undisturbed, in private, the people in Britain are an odd crew. In France Macron can respond to the gilets jaunes with a ‘grand debate’ partly because the people are recognised as legitimate actors there. All that British politics can offer is a faint focus group echo of the voice of the ‘doorstep’ from a lectern. The people are not doers. They send messages to the doers: hence the mass confusion of signal and noise that the Brexit crisis has become.

Above all, it seems, they want her to “get on with it.” They want it finished. This is her task. In a republican twist on Thursday (March 21), she spoke to them directly, spurning the institutions, the cultures and the party structures upon which her power is built. They are less important, she told the audiences at home, than you and me. My power is your will.

“…you the public have had enough,” she told us. Where, you wonder, did her imagination place this notional “us” as she stared down the lens? What did we look like? How would we respond to the substantial amount of insight she was about to share about how we all felt? 

But rather than a lens, perhaps for a moment she saw a mirror. Because what was staring back, her address seemed to tell us, was a mass of worn faces, a bit put out at having to attend to this proclamation in the first place. Above all else, the Britain that May saw staring back at her was tired.

“You are tired of the infighting. You are tired of the political games and the arcane procedural rows. Tired of MPs talking about nothing else but Brexit when you have real concerns…”

Democratic exhaustion

It’s the work of more sensitive political structures than the UK’s to articulate what the cause of that tiredness might be. If May did see her own exhaustion laid out before her in row upon row of living rooms from Maidstone to Mallaig, did she register a glimmer of her own culpability, or her party’s, in this great national fatigue? We may never know, the times are too torrid for the thought of memoirs.

Yet decades of precedent demanding the decisive exercise of executive power by her office discourage most forms of reflection. This, in turn, makes it hard to love the people. The people can be fickle, you see. They’ll tell you one thing, via one advisor, one day, and something entirely contradictory, via another, the next.

Tasked with playing the role of people’s tribune at this moment of impending revolution, she must now be a populist, railing against a dithering establishment frustrating the popular will. She must connect a live wire to the people — despite a mesh of obstacles assembled over three decades as a professional politician. Where might she begin to look for them? There is family, there is the church, there is the CA, there is business, then there are the civil servants, the ministerial visits, the odd constituent.

It’s a cruel joke inflicted on her by the mendacious and callous political movement to which she belongs. Be a populist, Theresa! You are among the least equipped individuals in the land to pull it off. But that doesn’t matter. The authentic 17,410,742 are the basic, indeed the only, democratic truth holders. The 16,141,241 crowd the picture, weary too. Perhaps, just, willing to go along with her, out of expediency. A homeland populated with commuters, not workers. Of service users, not citizens. ‘Why can’t somebody else fix this?’ They groan.

‘You want this stage of the Brexit process to be over and done with. I agree. I am on your side.’ She responds. Our side. A national side. A happy few.

Losing the peace

Britain, like all old empires, is still uneasy at peace. The ties that bind are a kind of contingency, a willingness to mobilise against external threat. The long peace heralded with 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement turned out to be a short one, as though there was a searching need to be deployed again the minute Blair signed it. Because that’s who “we” are, a defensive compact of peoples. 

Fittingly, for a martial society, the British have tended to only emerge as a cohesive people, with clear social demands after periods of extended conflict. Unity of purpose, and the clear popular will required for radical shifts like Brexit, have traditionally required blood sacrifice and a demobbed mass of young people to shift the scales.

Little wonder that the people are thought to want clear resolutions. There are sides to be chosen and there are winners and losers, pity those who choose wrongly.

Collapse of the Right

Theresa May and her party represent Britain’s winning classes. This base has brought them a remarkable resilience. 40 years in, the hegemony of the British right is starting to collapse in on itself. Theresa May is not simply an unerringly bad Prime Minister with the wrong skills at the wrong time. Her premiership represents a far more essential failure of British politics, a breakdown between government and the governed. Yet all the while, failure itself is unspeakable.

In life, people lose things all the time. Loss is mundane. On a day to day basis, most people who work in politics don’t experience a great clash of ideas and rival forces; instead, their work is a daily struggle to keep the show on the road. In that world loss is taboo — it means ritual humiliation.

The British political system cannot contain gradations of loss, or the grey areas of failed projects. The foundational reality of British democracy is that the winner takes all. This reality cannot be reconciled with the current national crisis in which everyone, ultimately, must lose something.

First published on the author’s own site

Filed Under: Articles, Brexit, Politics, UK Tagged With: Brexit, UK

About Christopher Silver

Christopher Silver is a writer and producer, now completing a PhD on the Scottish press

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Tony O'Donnell says

    March 26, 2019 at 1:07 pm

    My first impression of May was that her character seemed more suited to brisk, backroom administration than the interpersonal hurly-burly of frontline politics.I was wrong. It’s now clear that she’s spectacularly inept at both, but at least her breathtaking inadequacy highlights a greater failing – a political system no longer fit for the 21st century.If the UK only stirs itself when faced with a fight, the struggle this time is to modernise our democracy and prepare for PR, coalitions, and simple and transparent parliamentary procedures so that electors can clearly see what their representatives are achieving.If they become any good at their job in a reformed legislature, then there’ll no longer be an excuse for dodgy referenda.

    Reply
  2. William Ross says

    March 27, 2019 at 6:48 am

    Christopher Silver seems to revel in writing dreamy essays devoid of meaning.

    It is laughable drivel. He compares the supposedly hat- doffing British to the enlightened French who are “legitimate actors” and who can thus “participate” in the progressive “grand debate”.

    Well after the greatest single democratic exercise in British history, during which Remain outspent Leave by 50% the British people, in the wake of our grand debate, voted to leave Christopher`s beloved EU. We became “legitimate actors ” with a vengeance! He has never got over it and seems to spend every waking hour and every vacuous article trying to subvert it.The French people on the other hand will not be allowed to vote on Frexit because Macron knows he will probably lose. These “legitimate actors” cannot be allowed to act. And what about the French “legitimate actors”? Well unlike the poor stupid people “ooop north” here the legitimate actors in France have for a generation been torn between the extreme left and the neo Vichy right. Rioting achieves a lot in France.Heaven help us from going there.

    Christopher`s views on May being appalling and giving sucour to Lord North ( now the second worst ever PM) are absolutely correct of course. But May is appalling because she betrayed the 2016 vote. She is a creature of the pathetic pro Remain establishment which has lost all contact with the people. She and her Remainer friends are endangering our historic democracy and may usher in movements seen in “enlightened” France.

    William

    William

    Reply
  3. florian albert says

    March 28, 2019 at 10:05 pm

    ‘The long peace heralded with 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement proved to be a short one.’

    Hardly anybody in Great Britain viewed 1998 as the start of a long peace. It involved the settling – for good, it was hoped – of a regional quarrel about which they cared little.

    For most people in Great Britain, the long peace is the period since 1945. There has been violence but it has not greatly affected most people here. (The same can not be said of many of the countries where troops were deployed.)

    Similarly, this is not a martial society. By historic standards, the armed services are tiny and have a small percentage of public spending allocated to them. For most of the public, they are peripheral institutions, more useful for parades which attract tourists than as protection against enemies.

    The last two campaigns they were involved in, Iraq and Afganistan, were motivated by liberal interventionism. This may have been utterly deluded but it was not imperialism.

    Reply
  4. William Ross says

    March 29, 2019 at 12:12 pm

    Florian Albert

    You are quite right to focus on the “long peace” nonsense . In fact the IRA only agreed the Good Friday Agreement because they had been defeated in in the field. After all, giving the people of Northern Ireland the ultimate right to decide their future and for ROI to drop its claims to NI must have been anaethema to Republicans. ( and to be clear —- the EU contributed exactly nothing to the process) Additionally, there is no sign of an end of the 1998 peace. Sinn Fein are quite clear about that. Additionally, it has come to light that ROI and the EU have a plan to deal with the NI/ROI border in the event of a No Deal– check lorries away from the border! So now ROI and the EU confirm what we have been saying all along, there will never be a hard border in Ireland again, no matter what happens.
    Unicorns, unicorns and “magical thinking”!

    The backstop has been an elaborate con which only a complete idiot like our present PM could ever have accepted.

    William

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Primary Sidebar

About Sceptical Scot

Welcome to Sceptical Scot, Scotland’s premier non-tribal forum for passionate, informed debate. Sceptical Scot is for all who care about Scotland’s future, regardless of how they vote: for party, independence or union, EU or Brexit. We aim to provide an arena that is both broader and deeper than current online/print offers with a rich diet of well-researched, polemical, thought-provoking writing. Read more » about About Sceptical Scot

What’s new on Sceptical Scot

  • Another struggle to deliver independence March 28, 2023
  • Humza faces a hard landing March 27, 2023
  • Eradicating poverty in Scotland: a long way to go March 27, 2023
  • Scotland does not need nuclear energy March 27, 2023
  • The rules of the road in the Highlands March 22, 2023
  • How sustainable are Scottish tax and spend policies? March 22, 2023
  • Scotland needs a new politics – and fresh policy options March 17, 2023
  • What does Hunt’s first Budget mean for Scotland? (Update) March 16, 2023
  • ChatGPT, you’re fired! March 14, 2023
  • Impartiality and public service media March 13, 2023

The Sceptical Newsletter

The Sceptical Scot cartoon

Categories

  • Articles (664)
  • Blog (543)
  • Books & Poetry (26)
  • Brexit (206)
  • climate crisis (5)
  • climate crisis (28)
  • Covid19 (65)
  • Criminal justice (17)
  • Culture (306)
  • Devo20 (1)
  • Economics (191)
  • Economy (110)
  • Education (75)
  • Elections (187)
  • Energy (1)
  • Environment (67)
  • European Union (259)
  • Featured (41)
  • Federalism (19)
  • federalism (13)
  • Health (63)
  • History (69)
  • Housing (23)
  • Humour (11)
  • identity (14)
  • Independence (279)
  • Inequality (77)
  • International (36)
  • Ireland (6)
  • Ireland (8)
  • Local government (82)
  • Longer reads (72)
  • Media (11)
  • Podcast (3)
  • Poetry (72)
  • Policy (218)
  • Politics (342)
  • Polls and quizzes (1)
  • Reviews (24)
  • Social democracy (84)
  • Trump (10)
  • UK (344)
  • Uncategorized (6)

Sceptical Scot elsewhere

Facebook
Twitter

Footer

About Sceptical Scot

Since 2014 Sceptical Scot has offered a non-tribal forum for passionate, informed debate for all who care about Scotland’s future

Recommended

  • Bella Caledonia
  • Centre on Constitutional Change
  • The UK in a Changing Europe
  • Common Space
  • Gerry Hassan
  • Scottish Review
  • Social Europe
  • Think Scotland

Archives

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in