What Will Brexiteers Yearn For Now They Have Won?
“It is easy to laugh, but laughter is not an effective political tool, because the only people laughing with you are those who agree.”
(Gold, 2020)
As Big Ben’s synthetic chimes rang in the formal moment where Britain left the European Union at 11pm on Friday 31st January 2020, the cheers of the assembled crowd of ardent Brexiteers swelled across London’s Parliament Square. Among those present was Tanya Gold, a British journalist for Harper’s Magazine, there to observe and document her experience, which appeared a day later in The New York Times opinion section in a piece entitled ‘I Went to a Brexit Celebration Party’ (Gold, 2020). Gold immediately acknowledges that it’s both fashionable and easy to laugh at Brexiteers, that it’s a joke that often rings hollow, yet proceeds to do just that. She shares that liberal readers may seek to marginalize populist protagonists such as Nigel Farage, but that the Brexit vote of 2016 was his defining moment of success after decades of opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Big Ben, at the time under repair, and who’s famous ‘bongs’ were prerecorded, provides Gold with what she refers to as ‘an exquisite metaphor for the recent paralysis in British democracy’ (Gold, 2020). A paralysis motivated by decades of policy failure and stagnation which created the political and economic vacuum out of which Brexit was empowered to thrive as a movement, and into which Farage, Johnson, and Cummings opportunistically rushed (Guillen 2018). That in the wake of so much change and upheaval, and employing a common populist tactic, the electorate had been given a simple solution to a highly complex problem (Guillen, 2020). Remain and continue to be subject to the rules of others or leave and ‘take back control’ of borders, trade, and unwanted foreign influence. Prime Minister David Cameron’s remainer campaign greatly underestimated the anti-European Union sentiment of an electorate who seized upon their moment to roll back decades of closer ties with mainland Europe. He was out of office less than a month later, handing the transition to Theresa May, who now had the impossible political position of having campaigned to remain but now had to implement ‘the will of the people’ and leave. (Guillen, 2018)
But in her anthropological observations of the victorious Brexiteers, and her detailed descriptions of the songs they sing, the fiercely patriotic clothes they wear, and the messages their banners proclaim, she holds her subjects at a forensic, dismissive distance. And in doing so, reinforces a deliberate perspective of us and them, dismissing the assembled crowd’s identity as clearly still them. A lens through which her liberal readers may observe without fear of joining in. Her insight that ‘I had not heard such a swath of regional accents in central London before’ or ‘men in fine suits stood with working men and women from as far north as Cumbria’ (Gold, 2020) speaks to the urban elitist insularity against which many of those voting leave protested. That in doing so, Gold herself is part of the problem, missing populism’s highly effective ability to cut across demographic, economic, geographic, and sociological differences (Guillen, 2020).
Gold also remarks on the finality of the moment for all involved. That with nothing left to yearn for, and the dissolution of the campaign’s community, the will of the people has become the law of the land. The article doesn’t openly mock those in attendance, but there’s a clear dismissive tone and distance in her perspective, and how thankful we might be that this political chapter is drawing to an end. She closes with an ominous question about what’s next, asking ‘who will they blame if it is not enough?’ Perhaps those who write columns such as this.
Latest Articles
