From MAGA Hats to Magna Carta, why Brexit Britain is Broken

The newspaper headline was beautifully apt for the week when “sovereignty” was in the air: “Man tried to steal Magna Carta from Salisbury Cathedral because he thought it was fake”. Like something out of a Tintin comic the radio reported the thief was stopped by people shouting “he’s trying to steal the Magna Carta!”

As Britain leaves the EU (but doesn’t really) we are entering a new phase of heightened symbolism where flags replace dialogue and songs replace ideas. Whilst the singing of Auld Lang Syne by the European parliament may have given us a warm and fuzzy feeling, or the flying of the EU flag over Holyrood might make us feel momentarily triumphant, both are empty gestures as the reality of power and impotence lands.

Farage and his coterie of hypocrites have won.

Flying their tiny flags and nursing their imaginary grievances they treated us one more time to their performative imbecility:

The Brexit Party will have to give up the gravy-train they enthusiastically boarded and will instead have to suck on the teat of Aaron Banks or some other billionaire bank-roller for their toxic populism. No doubt Nigel will be back soon spending someone else’s money nursing someone else’s grievance, milking someone else’s misery on the television you and I pay for.

Next to Farage teetered Ann Widdecombe to his right – and Claire Fox (physically) to his left. The full list of the Brexit Party’s MEPs can be found here, including Scotland’s own Brian Monteith who, we’re told – among career highlights – “has advised governments in Trinidad & Tobago, Pakistan and Botswana, and helped prepare the Nigerian President’s submission for the Paris climate accord of 2016.”

As Scotland is ejected from Europe there is pathos in watching the Vice President of the EU being one Mairead McGuinness, from a small northern independent European country called Ireland.

The optics, as they say, aren’t good.

But among all the flag-waving, the coin-minting and the fist-clenching there’s a bitter predicament that isn’t going away. The tiny flag Farage and his swivel-eyed crew waved cretinously at their disbelieving colleagues is the Union Jack.

As Fintan O’Toole writes: “Brexit has to present itself in these terms: a suppressed people rising up, as Jacob Rees-Mogg puts it, to set itself “free of the heavy yoke of the European Union”.

Such myth-making is darkly comic but has been politically very useful eliding over the great chasm of social inequality and poverty that stalks the land.

But if this is a nationalist populism it’s one without a nation. The flag they’re flying is a one without a country. The bitterest pill for Brexiteers has got to be that Britain has been killed in its “liberation”.

Farage and friends are imaginary patriots of an imaginary nation nursing imaginary grievances.

As O’Toole notes:

“… there is a great irony: Britain is not and never has been a nation-state. For most of its history as a state, it has been at the heart not of a national polity, but of a vast multinational and polyglot empire. And the UK is itself a four-nation amalgam of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is no single pre-EU UK “nation” to return to. There is no unified “people” to whom power is being returned. And this is the contradiction that the Brexit project cannot even acknowledge, let alone resolve.”

Nor does Johnson’s repression of Scottish democracy work any magic wonders, nor does his triumph in what they call ‘the North’ either.

The HS2 project is facing mass opposition as it crumbles under the wight of its vast overspend and ridiculousness, it can neither be the great project that unites the UK nor even the great project that unites England north and south.

It’s worth remembering that someone somewhere thought up the hashtag  #BringingBritainCloserTogether for a rail project that runs from Birmingham to Leeds (!)

Someone’s not been paying attention in Geography.

And then, just on cue comes the announcement that Boris Johnson and Sajid Javid are preparing for “5% cuts across all departments”.

So as we’re told that’s it all done and dusted, in reality we enter another “transition phase”.

Britain’s slow remorseless grinding process of change continues but now with blue passports, and Beatrice and Eugenie instead of Harry and Meaghan, Johnson instead of May and missing significant amounts of European funding and connections.

Britain will continue, with extra bunting for Liberation Day still teetering towards No Deal despite all that having been now swept away in a mixture of boredom and defeat. Johnson and his team have now just eleven months to negotiate a trade deal with the remaining EU and simultaneously deal with a MAGA-hat wearing president under impeachment and in an electoral cycle.

The problem for “Britain” is not just that it doesn’t exist it – but that the multitude of social problems that fueled this national humiliation really do.

They – like the constitutional crisis – aren’t going away anywhere. They will come back to haunt those celebrating in triumph today.

It’s easy to say this is all  David Cameron’s fault, or Nigel Farage’s but the peeling apart has been a long time coming.

Way back in 2007, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown made an extraordinary speech on the subject of Britishness that tells a tale of political detachment from deep cultural and constitutional problems.

In it he said:

“A few years ago less than half – 46% – identified closely with being British. But today national identity has become far more important: it is not 46% but 65% – two thirds – who now identify Britishness as important, and recent surveys show that British people feel more patriotic about their country than almost other European country.

One reason is that Britain has a unique history – and what has emerged from the long tidal flows of British history – from the 2,000 years of successive waves of invasion, immigration, assimilation and trading partnerships, from the uniquely rich, open and outward looking culture – is I believe a distinctive set of British values which influence British institutions.

Indeed a multinational state, with England, Scotland, Wales and now Northern Ireland we are a country united not so much by race or ethnicity but by shared values that have shaped shared institutions. Indeed, when people are asked what they think is important about being British many say our institutions: from the monarchy and the national anthem to the Church of England, the BBC and our sports teams.”

There is so much of this that is so baffling wrong its hard to know where to begin.

I suppose we could begin by noting that the identity figures he quotes are for England not Britain and that his sense of history is bizarrely wrong (what was the 2000 year old entity?) – and that all of his references to institutions are ones that resonate only in England:  the monarchy and the national anthem to the Church of England.

If we are to ask why Brexit Britain is a disunited kingdom – a broken husk of an idea – we need to go back to the politicians that in the pursuit of power disregarded its constituent parts and stamped “Britain” across us all. Reaching a crescendo of magnificent contradiction, a Scot preaching Britishness declared:

“And there is a golden thread which runs through British history – that runs from that long-ago day in Runnymede in 1215 when arbitrary power was fully challenged with the Magna Carta, on to the first bill of rights in 1689”.

 

 

Comments (19)

Leave a Reply to Hamish100 Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published.

  1. Andrew Craig says:

    Gordon Brown has a First in History from Edinburgh and a PhD in the same subject. The 2007 was cringeworthy nonsense on both an historical and cultural level. It was pitched at English voters who don’t know much about their own shameful imperial past but cling to the comforting mythology of” Britishness” which, like all mythology, is conveniently insulated from reality. Of course, this was back when Labour still took Scotland for granted . How times have changed.

    1. Graeme Purves says:

      Gordon Brown’s Ph.D. was on ‘The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–29’, and it took him 10 years to complete it . His historical perspective has always been a rather narrow one.

  2. Bill says:

    And Brown is supposed to be an historian

    1. James Mills says:

      …and was supposed to be a Scot , supposed to be a clever Chancellor , supposed to be an intelligent politician …. and gave us The Vow !

  3. Jeel says:

    “… bought and sold for …” – Little changes.

  4. Josef Ó Luain says:

    That it takes a Nortside, Dub penman to put things into perspective on our behalf, must also tell us something about our analytical shortcomings here in Scotland.
    Mairead McGuinness sending them and their flags packing: oh how she must’ve relished that wonderful and clearly unscripted moment. No Blue Shirt myself, by a long way, I certainly relished it.

  5. Fay Kennedy says:

    She was brilliant. A moment worth savouring.

      1. Jo says:

        Mairead McGuinness?

  6. Roland Stiven says:

    Delighted to discover recently that my two teenage kids did not know the British national anthem. That, I feel, is great progress.

  7. Hamish100 says:

    Surely you mean the British Nationalist Anthem.

    I’ve mentioned this a few times to my unionist colleagues at work. Britnats, as l say these days. They don’t like it. Guilty pleasures are sweet.

  8. SleepingDog says:

    This golden stream that has been running through British history, anointing the heads of the establishment with their arbitrary power checked only by fictitious gods and the curse of progressive international law, has collected into quite a brown puddle now. Gordon Brown couldn’t even successfully challenge the royal prerogatives for all that he made that a key plank of his first Commons statement as Prime Minister:
    https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2007-07-03/debates/07070334000001/ConstitutionalReform#contribution-07070334000154
    (or the Privy Council which he joined, for that matter).

  9. Hamish100 says:

    Sad to see Wings over Scotland implying that the First Minister is a betrayer (of Scotland). This the the blog which undermined the SNP before last years General Election and may stand against Independence parties next year.

    Of course, the underminer’s chuck their tuppence in demanding everything but with no thought of what that something else is in today’s political reality.

    So the Scottish Election will be our reverendum.

    1. Jo says:

      Hamish
      I’ve seen different versions of what Sturgeon said today. According to The National she declared she’s “ready” to take Johnson to court. I don’t think she said that so I don’t think it’s honest of them, or helpful. Then again, I don’t believe Sturgeon has managed this whole thing well at all.

      The Herald threads have a few SNP members saying they’ve resigned from the Party and they’re urging the boy-man MacNeill to form a new Party….along with the nonentity Chris McEleny. That’ll help…not!

    2. Yes. Crass hypocrisy.

      You also have to ask who can afford a two month holiday?!!

  10. Hamish100 says:

    To the editor

    You are correct of course, the hypocrisy emanating from wings over Scotland is so marked. 2 months holiday? Maybe, the individual has another court case to deal with? Who knows.
    What is as soon as individuals like me criticised his ideas of a new party we were removed from the WoS blog. Not 1 sweary word in sight too!

    Yet those attacking the Snp, the whole notion of independence are encouraged. For those of us who recognise that we are so close to winning but just not enough to be certain however frustrating we will continue to be loyal to our country and the cause. We won’t have months off.

  11. Hamish100 says:

    Any truth in Campbell of WoS doing a turn on RT tv while Salmond is indisposed in the next month or so?

  12. Richard says:

    The Magna Carta quoted at the end of this piece features a lot in Brexit ideology.

    “Spiked Online” Editor Brendan O’Neill cited it recently in his piece undermining the uniquely British institution of the BBC as an example of the uniqueness of Britain. (O’Neill, it must be noted, positions himself as champion of the people in the necessity of Britain “Taking Back Control”. He is also recipient of $300,000 of extremist billionaire Koch Political Foundation money, disbursed for the purpose of promulgating propaganda for the purposes of facilitating control of the UK economy by US business interest).

    Ironically, the parties to the Magna Carta immediately reneged on its agreements. Civil War followed.

    Irony doesn’t end there. Magna Carta was the first document to guarantee our right to swift justice and a fair trial. Its successor is the European Convention on Human Rights, as enacted in the UK’s Human Rights Act. since that acts as an effective brake against executive lawlessness, Brexiteers might be expected to seek its repeal and, in fact, are.

    Thus we have the the absurdity of the Brexiter’s humectant reminiscences about the Magna Carta to the strains of Vaughan Williams even as they repeal its successor.

    That’s the real Golden Thread running through British history – our total inability to recall it.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.