The Exterminating Brexit

The British Road to Ruin

In Luis Buñuel’s classic film The Exterminating Angel, a group of wealthy guests are invited to a dinner party by a friend. As the evening unfolds, the servants slip away one by one, leaving only the majordomo. This is strange enough, but then the guests discover for some inexplicable reason that they can’t leave. They try to, but whenever they reach the door, they find themselves turning back.

As the days and nights pass, the carapace of bourgeois civility crumbles, and chaos ensues. The guests revert to savagery. A couple kill themselves. Some sheep enter the house, which are quickly roasted and eaten. A cupboard is used for a toilet. Outside, police surround the house to hold back the curious crowd, but the guests still can’t leave.

Is it fear that traps them? Conformity? Bourgeois guilt or a magical spell? This is a surrealist film, so no rational explanations are offered for what appears to be an outbreak of mass psychosis. Whatever the reason, the predicament of Buñuel’s guests is not that different to the surreal political situation in which the United Kingdom finds itself, nearly ten years after the 2016 referendum on EU membership.

Think of Brexit as a (dog’s) dinner party, which millions of voters chose to attend and millions were dragged to against their will. All of us remain equally trapped in the house that Brexit built, even though most of us are not enjoying the dinner. A YouGov poll last June found that 56 percent of voters now believe that leaving the EU was a mistake, and that 61 percent believe that Brexit has been ‘more of a failure than a success.’

The same poll found that 56 percent of voters favoured ‘Brejoining’ the EU at some point in the future. Yet despite some tentative attempts by the government to ‘reset’ UK/EU relations, there has been no serious momentum to achieve this outcome, and it is unlikely, in the short term at least, that there will be.

This is partly because the rightwing media in the UK (the majority), and the increasingly interchangeable Reform/Conservative bloc, still seize on even the most innocuous attempts to modify EU/UK relations as a ‘betrayal of Brexit’. Others, such as the ever-toxic Daily Express - the mad dog of the British press - continue to campaign for a ‘proper Brexit’, whatever that is.

No one can be surprised by this. Cargo cults don’t give up just because John Frum don’t come. But even politicians who may admit in muted tones that Brexit has been a failure, are still too frightened to say so out loud, let alone criticise those who were most responsible for it. And as for voters, for every ‘Bregret’ - regret about the exit - poll, there are other polls indicating that large swathes of the electorate are prepared to vote locally and nationally for Reform UK - a ‘party’ led by the man who did more than any single individual to make Brexit possible.

That alone, should have pushed Nigel Mosley-Farage to the margins of British politics and discounted him as a serious commentator on anything at all. Instead, this is the man currently poised to take Starmer’s place in Downing Street, regardless of the fact that there is nothing in Mosley-Farage’s career or his politics, or his ideas on anything at all, to suggest that he has even the minimal qualifications for high or low political office.

To elect Farage is the political equivalent of a cancer patient asking a doctor to give you more cancer. It’s like sending an internet scammer your new credit card details after he’s already drained your bank account with your old one.

Anyone who doubts this should look at the dark money flowing into Reform UK’s coffers. £9 million from Thai-based aviation fuel/cryptocurrency billionaire Christopher Harborne. £200, 000 paid by a Kazakh-Iranian billionaire family to a churchwarden from Potters Bar, channelled into Reform’s coffers via an interior design company with no assets.

As Margo Robbie would say, who would do that? And why does the anti-elitist man of the people need money from dodgy billionaires, and what do they want from him? No one asks, or at least, no one who counts, because everyone knows that you don’t say things like that in the house of Brexit.

And so the leering grifter-in-chief and his cronies march gaily on, leading the country ever closer towards a political, strategic and moral failure without parallel in British history. That future is already stamped all over their manifesto’ - a stale farrago of back-of-a-fag packet unicornry, fiscal wand-waving, saloon bar bore ‘common sense’ rejections of net zero, anti-workery culture war fodder, reactionary MAGA-style paeans to national greatness, entirely unrealistic pledges to ‘re-industrialise’, promises of detention and deportation, and withdrawal from one treaty and commitment after another.

None of this shows the slightest correlation with reality, or any concern with the potential consequences of its crowd-pleasing sloganry. Of course Reform wants to leave the ECHR - the Holy Grail of a ‘proper Brexit’ - because that would make it possible to deport more people. Never mind that successful challenges to deportations at the ECHR represent a tiny minority of all completed deportations for criminal offences, according to the government’s own figures.

Leaving the ECHR would nevertheless detach the UK from another treaty binding it to the liberal democratic order - as flawed as that is. And that is the game Nigel, Bannon and his backers are playing. Migrants, refugees and ‘illegals’ are merely the manufactured threat that makes this agenda possible.

The United States is still powerful enough - for now - to get away with such behaviour, and throw its arrogant weight around. The UK has no weight to throw around. Beyond its ability to terrorize migrants, it cannot bend the world to its will, and a Reform government would unleash ICE-style social devastation on a scale unseen in this country, whilst also turning the country into a deregulated, libertarian dystopia from which only Nigel and his pals - and the UK’s enemies - would benefit.

Anyone who doubts how awful a Reform UK government would be has only to look at the performance of its councils, or the constant procession of racist and far right freaks who course continually through its ranks. In local government, Reform UK councillors have behaved like vicious children. DOGE-style ‘common sense’ money saving agendas against non-existent agencies; council tax raises when the opposite was promised; Trump-style press bans; reckless budgeting - imagine this played out on a national scale with flags flying from every street.

Last week, Reform threatened to defund Bangor University because its student debating society refused an offer from Reform MP Sarah Pochin to ‘debate’ them. Cue a chorus of sneering and threats from the likes of Isobel Oakeshott and Lee Anderson. ‘We’re coming for you’ growled the unbearable oaf who might even end up as Home Secretary.

No serious country would put people like this in charge of anything at all, and expect anything good to come of it. But in the house of Brexit, the unthinkable is always just around the corner. The theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing of Nazi Germany once observed:

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil always carries the seeds of its own destruction, as it makes people, at the least, uncomfortable. Against folly we have no defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no use; facts that contradict personal prejudices can simply be disbelieved — indeed, the fool can counter by criticizing them, and if they are undeniable, they can just be pushed aside as trivial exceptions.

Politically-speaking, the UK has been locked into a trajectory of folly for some time - folly according to the historian Barbara Tuchman description of ‘wooden-headedness’, which:

consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts

Political folly does not necessarily mean stupidity, or at least not individual stupidity. Folly is a collective process, a form of group-think, in which the mad and the foolish become normal because no one dares say that they should not be. Erich Fromm once wrote of the ‘folly à millons’ in which millions of people engage in pathological and delusional behaviour while still believing they are individually sane and rational.

Brexit was and is a clear example of this process. It was a collective decision based on wishful thinking, false promises and unrealistic expectations; on intellectual laziness, inadequate information , for which nobody concerned, not the politicians who campaigned for it, the commentators who supported it, or the voters who voted for it, have taken any responsibility for.

It was folly for a middle-ranking power to cut itself off from the largest trading bloc in the world without a very good reason, and without a very clear idea of how it was going to manage the consequences. It was folly to make promises that could never be delivered and it was folly to believe those promises.

Naturally, none of those responsible have reflected on the poor outcomes Brexit has produced. If it didn’t turn out well, that was because they were ‘betrayed’ or because Brexit was not done well - whatever well was.

And now this initial folly has metastasised into a permanent condition, in which each stupid act is cancelled out by the next one. It was folly to elect Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as prime ministers. It was folly on the part of this Labour government to allow Mosley-Farage to set the agenda. It is folly on the part of so many media outlets that Mosley-Farage is not questioned more closely about his own and his party’s Russian connections, and about where Reform’s money comes from.

It would be an act of unforgivable and irremediable folly if the British electorate puts a man who should be a national pariah in Downing Street.

In The Exterminating Angel, the guests finally escape when one of them remembers where the guests were sitting when they first arrived. By revisiting the past and retracing their steps, the guests finally discover that they could leave all along. In the UK, we are nowhere near this outcome. Nearly a decade later, a foolish and deluded country that lost contact with the real world, and that has never had the courage to revisit or reflect upon its monumental act of folly, is poised to make an even more disastrous mistake.

Millions of voters may have genuinely believed the promises that were made back in 2016. Too many have been unable or unwilling to reassess that decision, to the point when a decayed and radicalised Tory Party is now falling into the arms of the man who destroyed.

Unable or unwilling to recognise the destructive game that Mosley-Farage and his pals are playing, voters and politicians remain trapped in the world that Brexit made, a world where one folly is piled on the other. A credulous population that believed Brexit would make the country great again, is now poised to pursue the same outcome with the same man who lied to them before.

Too many refuse to see that Brexit was only the beginning of a process of state capture that is still ongoing. And until we recognise this, and have the courage required to revisit how it happened and what we might do about it, we will remain stuck where Brexit left us, condemned to repeat and compound our mistakes, at the mercy of the billionaires and predators, in a country that still has a very long way to fall.