Being Othered

It’s a strange feeling, being put beyond the pale.  Being made to feel that you are simply not part of the mental world inhabited by the person talking to you, or over or around you.   

It is what a black person must feel, for instance, when they read in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings about the alien forces pitted against the heroes of Middle-Earth on the field of battle: they include ‘from Far Harad black men like half-trolls with white eyes and red tongues.’  I’m not sure what colour Tolkien expected black men’s eyes and tongues to be, or in what particular respect they were troll-like … he didn’t say; but such writing was indefensible by his own standards.  As a staunch Catholic he was a universalist by definition.  If you had asked him whether he thought black people were as much human as white people, or that their lives and souls were as valuable, the answer would have been an instant and indignant yes … as far as his conscious values went.  But on the page of his imagination, a black man stood for all that was disturbing, grotesque, Not Of Our World.  If it had crossed his mind that black people would be part of the readership of his book, he could not possibly have written this passage.  And I can only imagine the crushing, enraging sense of excision that a black fan of fantasy fiction would get on reading it.

I can imagine it slightly better, however, when I am in a company of exactly my own sort of people – mostly white, middle-class, comfortable, with higher degrees – and Brexit comes up.  Or even doesn’t come up, but is brought up in the little digs and asides here and there that assure the assembled company that it is like-minded, on the same respectable page.  One of my dearest friends, the last time we were part of the same gathering, found not just one but two occasions to get in a crack about ‘irrational Brexit voters’, to general approval.  If he knew I was one, would he be mortified and apologetic?  Or would he reconsider our friendship?  I don’t want either to happen … so I keep my discomfort to myself.  A Brexiter at our dinner table?  A chimaera, a troll.  Not so much excluded, as assumed not really to exist. 

It was entirely understandable that the result of the 2016 referendum was a shock and that people like my academic colleagues – whose jobs involve the juggling of many variables in planning, funding and recruitment and were going to be complicated by the fall-out for years to come – should have been exasperated by it.  But exasperation is not the same thing as hysteria.  Why the decision to go ‘full outrage’ on Brexit, and to keep the outrage up as months stretched into years?  Why make out that anyone who voted Leave was not just someone with a different opinion and perhaps mistaken, but either incorrigibly stupid or irredeemably evil? 

Unfortunately the decision seems to have been taken as soon as the referendum campaign started, if not before.  It began as an easy vote-winning strategy – to run a negative campaign by focusing on off-colour slogans and xenophobic remarks from UKIP, which had forced the referendum but was far from owning the market in Euroscepticism.  However, when this strategy failed to win votes, it could only confirm the Remainers in believing ever more extreme versions of their own propaganda.  If they exhorted the electorate to vote Remain or be bigoted, backward-looking idiots, and the electorate voted Leave, then the electorate must be bigoted, backward-looking idiots.  Q. E. D.  But the deduction is only as good as the premise.

It is a premise that leading Remainers are still locked into.  Have they learned by experience that you don’t persuade people to your side by labelling them evil or stupid?   Have they, since the referendum, made any attempt to sweeten their continued attempts to reverse or water down the referendum result, by telling Leave voters that they have heard their voice, understand their concerns, believe that these concerns could be addressed while remaining within the EU?  They have not.  Louder and louder, shriller and shriller, often accompanied by playground obscenity (‘Brexshitters’ to one regular in the 'Times' comments), the insults have continued to fly – and when Leavers lose their patience and retaliate in kind, this is taken to prove that the Remain side are the innocent victims in a dastardly coup, a ‘takeover’ of ‘their’ country.

Leavers are ‘other’.  They are not like us.  They are senile, under-educated, lower-class.  And they don’t read our newspapers or watch our programmes or look at our posts on Facebook, in fact they obviously can’t read or understand anything much at all, so they can be safely disregarded.  But hang on.  Even if those assumptions are correct, look at the social consequences, Remainers.  That’s the man who patiently taught you to drive, whom you are assuming is unable to form a valid political opinion of his own.  That’s the plumber whom you always get back because he is reliable and efficient, whom you are dismissing as a racist bigot.  That’s the dinner lady who always has a smile for your children, whose vote you are saying should count for less than a teenager’s.  They aren’t blind or deaf.  They notice, all right.  If you people are so educated and statesmanlike, do you really think that it is helping the country’s future social cohesion to go on in this way?

What is frightening is the near-glee with which Remainers are ready to tear up the social contract, to completely disavow any sense of solidarity with the half of the population who voted Leave, much less any sense of responsibility for these people and what they think and are.  But you – well-educated centrists, members of both mainstream, pro-EU political parties – you are responsible.  For decades, you have made the decisions that these terrible people lived under.  You educated them, you made the TV programmes they saw, you decided what their tax money was going to be spent on, you regulated their workplaces, their towns, their families.  If they now reject your advice in the first unmediated, single-issue political decision they have been allowed for years, mightn’t that be just a tiny bit down to you?  Is the working class that only yesterday you were loudly championing, excusing all its delinquencies, now to be petulantly written off, in the manner of some Victorian mother disappointed in her black sheep son, screaming ‘THE UNGRATEFUL BRUTE!  AFTER ALL I DID FOR HIM!  HE NEVER WAS ANY GOOD!  HE’LL NEVER DARKEN MY DOORS AGAIN!’  The suddenness and completeness with which Remainers have disowned the ‘information-poor’ classes since the referendum suggests that they were only waiting for a pretext to detach themselves completely from what had been ‘their’ nation and identify instead with an ‘emancipated’ international community.  Not since the twelfth century, when a Francophone ruling class ranged across Europe and beyond, treating the cloddish peasants who worked their estates with amused disdain, has there been such an overt rejection of the values of the ‘backward’ and local by the ‘forward-looking’ and fashionable in Britain.   

I feel as if I have a foot in both camps.  For me to vote Leave was a marginal decision taken reluctantly in what I hoped was the interest of Europe and not only of Britain.  The EU was manifestly in poor shape (it did not need the Daily Mail to tell us this) and I hoped that a large enough Leave vote would be a message to the EU leadership that a change of direction was needed.  I underestimated the extent to which the EU is fixed on its path by its accumulated policy decisions – to tug on any end only seems to pull the granny knot even tighter.  And unfortunately it seems I greatly overestimated the mental and moral capacity of Britain’s ruling political class.  It’s a shame that this is so, but probably better to find out how bad it is, through a shock like the referendum, than to remain unaware.  The progressives who were leading us to a liberal dawn through the twentieth century have finally, without realising it, morphed into a classic Ancien Regime: terrified of change, oblivious to opportunity, unable to deal with opposition except by characterising it as morally corrupt, the work of sinister, treacherous forces.  While the late-medieval Church mulled over ancient dogma and burned heretics, it burnished its halo by evoking the early Christian martyrs.  While the pro-EU establishment pockets donations of millions and plots legal manoeuvres in the House of Lords, its bon-enfant youth wing takes to the streets in the borrowed clothes of the hunger marchers and Civil Rights activists of the twentieth century, people for whom such gatherings were their only desperate chance to be seen and heard, and could result in arrest or physical attack – rather than just a nice selfie and a lot of upticks on Facebook.  Decadent.  It seems that in the end, whatever the principles an elite holds, however raised in consciousness it thinks it is, in the end, under threat, it will behave like an elite – it will fight as dirty as it needs to in order to preserve its privileges.  It has been a sorry, disillusioning spectacle and I see no improvement in the near future, as long as the self-styled ‘more intelligent’ half of the population remains unwilling to look at itself in the mirror or to conceive that ‘othering’ the other half, attempting to excise it from civic life and even from humanity, is no recipe for healing the nation’s ills, or indeed for preserving its own position in the long run.

I welcome the Briefings for Brexit initiative by Robert Tombs and Graham Gudgin.  It is a brave move, and just possible that the public avowal of the Leave vote by a number of independent, well-respected intellectuals will recall the Remainers to a more reasonable frame of mind and stem the flood of denunciation.  I hope Professor Tombs and his fellows are optimistic and have steady nerves, though.  Some friends and colleagues of decades will undoubtedly turn their backs.  Within hours of the story coming on the Sunday Times on line, one commenter, oblivious to the irony, had compared these independent-minded men to the academics who served under Hitler.  It is going to be a tough time.  Let’s hope we ride it out.