Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

Description

"There will not be much political writing in this or any other year that is carried off with such style" —The Times. A fierce, mordantly funny and perceptive book, from the author of Ship of Fools, about the act of national self-harm known as Brexit. A great democratic country tears itself apart, and indulges in the dangerous pleasures of national masochism. England's favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling's 'If' , says that triumph and disaster are the same thing. It also enjoins the English to 'lose, and start again at your beginnings/ And never breathe a word about your loss.' Most modern English heroics are screw-ups, retreats or disasters: the charge of the Light Brigade, the doomed Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage, 'Scott of the Antarctic', Gordon of Khartoum, the flight from Dunkirk. The parallels with Brexit are obvious, but the problem is that the cult of heroic failure was developed precisely in an empire that could afford to play up its failures because it was so successful. Its pathos becomes bathos in a post-imperial world. Failure is no longer heroic – it is just failure. Brexit is essentially an ultra-Thatcherite project of deregulation. In its own bizarre way, it is a kind of English revolutionary storming of the Bastille or the Winter Palace. On the Right, this idea of the single historic moment from which there is no going back has great appeal. The 'illiberal democracy' pioneered by Vladimir Putin has refined the idea. Once the strong man (Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) has taken power, he embodies the will of the people and is therefore entitled to control the media and the judiciary and crush dissent. But history does not work like this. And democracy doesn't function if we believe that a Year Zero can change the world for ever. Fintan O'Toole's ruthless dissection of the psychology and politics of Brexit is a stirring call to preserve democratic values and rational thought. Fintan O'Toole is a historian, biographer, literary critic and political commentator. His work has won many awards, and he writes for the Irish Times, Guardian and New York Review of Books. His books include A Traitor's Kiss, his life of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Judging Shaw and White Savage. His investigative, polemical books have all been bestsellers: Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, Ship of Fools and Enough is Enough. He is writing the authorised biography of Seamus Heaney and, for Head of Zeus, a history of Ireland in his own time.