This article was written earlier this year, before the original 29th March date of exiting the EU, in anticipation of the inability of the British Parliament to come to an agreement on the nature Britain’s exit. 

 

I hereby make it known that I renounce my Britishness and Englishness, and henceforth, whenever I am asked, I shall perhaps say that ‘I am from Britain’ but that ‘I am European’, an East Anglian, and a Londoner – but not a Briton. Because Chequers is dead, and nothing is coming after it.

Allow me to start from the beginning, so that this doesn’t sound like the ravings of a madman. For, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who proclaimed in the streets the more chilling “God is dead!”, I too have good reason to make this claim, and why it connects to the idea of Britain itself.

What Britain is as a community has seemingly been in question since the late 1990s, when the Good Friday Agreement, establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly (among other developments) cast doubt on whether ‘Britain’ should still be considered a nation, as it previously saw itself, or a union of nations. With the Devolution Acts, we seemed to affirm what Britain’s official name seemed to indicate; in fact, by emphasising the potential of Northern Ireland to join a united Ireland, the idea of an ‘indivisible British nation’ seemed a faint echo of history. As Fintan O’Toole put it in his article in The Guardian on 18^th January, all this was “barely visible within the political mainstream until David Cameron accidentally took the lid off by calling a referendum and asking people to endorse the status quo.” A majority of people describe themselves in Britain primarily as ‘British’ only in parts of London and unionist areas of Northern Ireland, according to the 2011 census. Everywhere else, some other national identity is held by the majority. This has profound effects on the legitimacy of the British political system and the authority of its institutions.

However, like all historical events, this one’s roots go back much further than the 90s. When Britain itself was established, it was as an empire-building project. James VI & I was the first to use the title King of Great Britain when he assumed the English throne in 1603, so as to better secure his claim to rule (ostensibly both parts of this island as if they were part of a natural whole). When this was institutionalised in 1707 with the Acts of Union, it came after a century of trying to bring the Scottish elite into an English-led compromise. A choice the Scots had thoroughly come to question by 1999; for context, the previous hundred years had been spent by the Irish trying to extricate themselves from this vehicle of empire-building.

This is precisely what it was. Britain has never been used as anything else by the largely English aristocrats who founded it than to press their ambitions of empire and plunder, which their powerful continental neighbours were proving themselves ever more effective in, as the 17^th and 18^th Centuries progressed. It was during the 18^th, at the beginning of which Britain was founded, that Britain’s trajectory was sent (despite setbacks and obstacles in the form of American Independence and the Napoleonic aftermath of the French Revolution) irreversibly upwards. By 1815, it had become Europe’s foremost imperial power. By Victoria’s death in 1901, Britain ruled the waves and almost a quarter of the Earth’s surface.

Only after the World Wars, Great Depression and its eclipse by the ostensibly non-nationalist imperial powers, the USA and USSR, did the story of ‘Britain’ have to be reconciled with state of play at home. The post-war era saw the end of the empire, initiated by its first province, Ireland, officially declaring itself a republic and no longer part of the Commonwealth in 1949; the era hence saw the end of Britain’s raison d’être. Where would its meaning and purpose come from now?

The Suez Crisis was the clearest sign Britain was no longer capable of maintaining its former imperial might, not even with the support of another European power equally determined to preserve its colonies. With the fade of empire into the immaterium came the crumbling of the metropolis at its centre, Britain itself. The patrician class, which had commanded a world-spanning empire, were now charged with overseeing an entangled hodgepodge of institutions which had been constructed ad-hoc to facilitate the needs of projecting imperial power. This was not a rational political community, but a fiefdom over which its rulers were in total, limitless control.

Economically, Britain was also in decline; the old model of importing food and raw materials from the colonies and exporting industrial goods to them quickly became insufficient. It was swiftly surpassed by the Six of Western Europe, who raced ahead with market integration. Militarily, France developed its own delivery systems for its nuclear deterrent, giving it some freedom from the shadow of US hegemony, which on the other hand Britain retreated further into, its patrician class coming to rely ever more on America to project what remained of their power. The authority of a political system which coalesced in 1689 and justified itself first and foremost with the ease it could pursue empire-building – absolute authority vested not in a man, but in Westminster, an assembly at the service of the English elite – was now left with neither its historical source of legitimacy (collapse of empire) nor a material one (economic stagnation).

From this maelstrom of decline (only somewhat arrested with accession to the European Community) being managed by an intellectually bankrupt elite incapable of halting that decline or reinventing itself, emerged Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. As Larry Siedentop wrote in Democracy in Europe in the early 2000s, her trick was to throw out the aristocratic paternalism adopted post-empire by Britain’s rulers in favour of promoting the petit bourgeois elements of the British middle class that hadn’t embraced the patrician attitude of its wealthier counterparts, in an attempt to inject a dynamic individualism into Britain’s moribund political order that would save it from collapse.

This involved more than promoting ‘yuppies’ and new property owners, or rooting out aristocratic paternalism, but also attacking the institutions which had been empowered by paternalism and undermined small property-owners – first and foremost the trade unions – and removing all controls from what would become the principal motor of the British economy for the next 30 years: finance. Unleashing this neoliberalism at the pinnacles of British society would bring about the rejuvenation Britain needed without jettisoning its supposed essence.

What happened instead was pandemonium; a tumult that has led all the way to the crisis of today. Crucially, the aristocratic paternalism of the ruling-class was all that remained of the old foundations on which Britain had been built. Their power, ambitions and compromises had, in the crucible of Westminster, formed the substance of the British state from its very existence. They were the state. What replaced it can be summed up by Thatcher’s infamous line “There’s no such thing as society”. A hyper-financialised form of capitalism almost fanatically self-interested and without any recognition of the deep connection between economics and politics; of the necessity of community for political order. That meant privatisation, liberalisation, tax cuts and the introduction of ‘market forces’ into social services – a programme implemented over the next 30 years by Thatcher and her successors. This would make a mockery of the idea that Britain was a living, organic political community; after the 2008 crash, produced by the very financial institutions that Thatcher had unshackled, a much maligned idea of community would be utterly destroyed.

Political events should be understood as waves; they are triggered by faraway forces and take time before they crash against the shore; the more distant and seemingly disconnected the trigger, the more forceful the impact. The neoliberalism that proclaimed to spread dynamic wealth-creation in the 80s and 90s (despite destroying organised labour and transferring masses of wealth and income from the north to London-based financiers), now spread misery through austerity. Austerity that was given justification by the expansion of debt to dangerous levels, which neoliberalism itself had ordained. The pain and suffering caused by this, the absence of identity, of community, of institutions following any principle or ideal, the sense of powerlessness, of being cast adrift on the waves Britain once ruled, led to Brexit.

We know the story of Brexit because we are living through it. We know it is being whipped up by people determined to displace all the mistakes and pain caused by the British state onto the EU, all the more galling when we remember the most neoliberal aspects of the EU were the brainchild of the British government in the 80s under Thatcher. We know it is an attempt to restore authority and legitimacy to British institutions that have long sat purposeless, bankrupt and hollow, occupied by people who have long exploited their immense power without understanding the complex social mechanisms which sustain it. Brexit, the product of British emptiness, was stillborn; as O’Toole put it in his article “It simply could not survive contact with reality. It died the moment it became real.” This is because the entity which gave birth to it was also long suffering its death throes.

The chapter of Brexit which illustrates this clearest is that fateful day Theresa May presented her so-called ‘Chequers’ deal to the European Council in Salzburg on 20^th September 2018 as the basis of a future relationship, and it was torn to shreds. Promptly, and with glee, ministers, backbench MPs and the great and good of London’s media circles all proclaimed: Chequers is dead! Frankie Boyle wrote on Twitter it reminded him of an Agatha Christie novel where the butler is found dead the bottom of the stairs. But it reminded me of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra because it represents the revelation of a silent, hidden truth.

The last compromise the Westminster system was capable of producing, a compromise as crucial now as they had been since 1689, was a totally bungled fiasco. It was the absence of any further potential to compromise. The British state was dead. It had been for a while and no one had understood this. Again, from O’Toole: “What we see with the lid off and the fog of fantasies at last beginning to dissipate is the truth that Brexit is much less about Britain’s relationship with the EU…It is the projection outwards of an inner turmoil.” Nietzsche in 1883 could not understand why everyone kept behaving as if the Christian church was still the supreme authority of European life when it was clear its power was long dead. Likewise, Chequers is dead, and that which produced it, the tangled morass of imperialism born in Westminster, was dead long before it. And now it can be seen.

Hence the statement I began with. Because Chequers’ death signifies to me the existence of Britain as a self-interested relic of a bygone era, but also its death as a workable political system. So, I can no longer identify with Britain. It is the location on a map, the place I was born. But it is not an identity, an ethos or a political community that I want to be part of. ‘Britain’ does not represent the culture or achievements that have been made by these islands over the past 300 years as modernity emerged from Europe’s many revolutions. It represents a moribund political system constructed to conquer an empire – both at home and across the globe. That empire is gone, and its symbols at home are long hollowed out, their contents thrown overboard.

Nor can I identify with England, whence came the idea of Britain as it has come to be; its embattled, debilitated last bastion. I am from West Essex, that patch of Essex colonised by the East End after the Blitz left it a ruin, making me awkwardly torn between East Anglia proper and London. But that does not need sorting out precisely because the identity I recognise first is one multifaceted in and of itself: Europeanism. It is not a national identity; it is far older and more complex than that. It is multi-national – transnational even. It draws from many diverse sources and perspectives, for that is Europe. It is in its diverse, transgressive, restless dynamism which I shall shelter as Britain’s death throes reach their climax.

I was not like this in 2016. I didn’t buy Englishness personally and not even the need to recognise it – England’s regions were far more diverse than people give them credit for. I certainly couldn’t see how Britain itself, in what it was, could be deeply bound up with the problem. But the failure of Britain is a rebellion of an England increasingly uninterested in sustaining the façade of a post-imperial delusion; uninterested in manning the walls of Britain’s last bastion. I still believe Britain is a distinct part of this continent, like Scandinavia or the Balkans – its history and politics is still more deeply intertwined than Europe’s in general. But now I have clarity. This Britain is not grounded on that recognition, but on raw, opportunistic power. Chequers is dead. Britain is currently the spectre of a dead empire, desperately trying to convince itself the spirit of that former imperial glory is still alive and well. It looks down on foreign peoples as Rome did the barbarians – or perhaps as the Greeks did, superior and yet unable to dominate them. It is a fragment from the Europe of yesterday. Probably, in fact, the day before yesterday. Ultimately, it goes against all I believe in, and I want no further part of it.