Brexit Day has come and gone and still we do not know what Brexit means. Boris Johnson, as we know, likes to see himself as a second Winston Churchill – a former maverick called on by his country to rescue it from an existential crisis. He prefers, however, not to remind us that the crisis in question, unlike that which faced Churchill, was largely of his own making and was engineered by him for his personal advantage. Now, at the cost to his country of historic and permanent disruption, he has acquired the premiership. What will he do with it? Churchill and Britain knew why he was prime minister; he had to win the war. But neither Mr Johnson (apparently) nor Britain (certainly) knows what is the Brexit, on the promise of which, he won the election. Which is presumably why he has instructed his government that from now on there is to be no more talk of Brexit. Brexit is to be regarded as "done" for, whatever it was, it has served its purpose.
Yet even the manufacturers of Sunderland, the most prominent of Britain’s Leave-voting cities, say they do not know what Friday means for them, that Saturday is the beginning of Brexit not the end. Any obvious changes are postponed to December 31st, the real Brexit Day, and even then much will be left in suspense, subject to future, and probably interminable, rounds of “further talks”. That in turn means a possibly indefinite continuation within Britain itself of the highly emotional disagreements provoked by the referendum.
Brexit discussion in Britain fell into two phases. In the first, from 2015 to 2017, the focus was on the question of identity, a Brexit understood in terms of UK “independence”, “taking back control”, “wanting my country back”. Fantasies of what Britain had been, and of what the EU was, took the place of any concrete plan for the future. “Brexit means Brexit”, Theresa May said, even after the referendum, acknowledging the vacuity. As Johnson’s previous incarnation might have put it: “Never in the field of human politics was so much decided by so many on the basis of so little information.”
Ludicrous ceremonies
In the second phase, the United Kingdom entered a constitutional crisis as parliament, the executive, the judiciary and even the monarch came into conflict on the television and computer screens of the world, amid ceremonies and recondite procedures, as ludicrous as they were impressive. Brexit almost ceased to be about either Europe or Britain, and became a matter of implementing “the will of the people” and heeding the voice of the country’s “left-behind” and their revolt against the “liberal metropolitan elite”.
The better part of five years’ discussion was not enough for the United Kingdom to come up with a realistic view of its relations with the rest of the world once it ceased to be a member of the EU. Why did a powerful and respected nation make itself ridiculous by burying its head in the sands of fantasy and self-obsession? The clue lies in the flummery and dramatics of the constitutional crisis. The dying agony of obsolete customs and conventions as they collided with the modernity of direct democracy and social media made for compulsive viewing because it was the symptom of a far deeper historical trauma which even so experienced an observer of British governance as Lord Hennessy has been unable to diagnose. “Getting out of the empire barely scratched the national psyche,” he has written. “Brexit has scored us deeply.” But these two decisive events are intimately connected. Precisely because Britain did not let itself even notice the loss of an empire it had spent over 300 years acquiring and fitting itself to govern, let alone react to the loss emotionally and practically, it has suffered a breakdown of its identity in the moment in which it has attempted to assert it.
What was Brexit after all but a schoolboy spat between Boris Johnson and David Cameron?
Britain needed to recognise that what it thought of as its own most characteristic political and social features, rooted in age-old tradition, its parliament, its civil service, its public schools and universities, were in their present form the products of the 19th-century imperial era and with the empire they would have to go.
Resurgent nationalism
If, like other former colonising and colonised states (the Low Countries, Germany, Spain, India), Britain had reacted to the loss of its imperial purpose by giving itself a republican and federal constitution, it would not have found its freedom of action in recent years constrained by unfinished business in Scotland and Ireland. Nor, if the resurgent nationalism of England, which had suppressed its own identity the better to rule the world under the name of Britain, had found expression in an English parliament, would England have demanded a Brexit for the sake of which the members of the Conservative Party, as they told the pollsters, would have been happy to abandon the union altogether. If Britain had adopted an electoral system better able to accommodate the multiple interests of a population rendered all the more diverse by its imperial past, it would not have seen parliamentary conventions undermined and cabinets bewildered by the formation of cross-party alliances (both for and against government policy) such as are normal in states with proportional representation and even in the USA. And, above all, if Britain had reformed its bipartite educational system, the world would not have seen the House of Commons scrapping like an ill-run debating society in one of the public schools or universities where most of its MPs learned the arts of politics, while it upended the future of its own people and an entire continent. What was Brexit after all but a schoolboy spat between Johnson and David Cameron, two rival Oxford-educated Old Etonians, and Nigel Farage, the envious alumnus of a lesser public school who had missed out on university? No wonder Johnson wants us all to forget it.
Nicholas Boyle is emeritus Schröder professor of German at Magdalene College, Cambridge. His January 2018 article ,Brexit is a collective English mental breakdown, has been read more than 60,000 times