72 THENEWYORKER, NOVEMBER 18, 2019
to a united Ireland and an independent
Scotland. (Its ratification will likely de-
pend on how Johnson’s party fares in an
election next month.) The Brexiteers
who have been celebrating the prospect
of a Great Britain unshackled and ready
to recapture imperial-era glory may end
up with nothing but a little England.
What are the roots of such madness?
T
his is, in effect, the question that
Fintan O’Toole sets out to answer
in his new book, “The Politics of Pain:
Postwar England and the Rise of Na-
tionalism” (Liveright). O’Toole might
quibble with my using “United King-
dom” and “Great Britain” interchange-
ably, since the United Kingdom, unlike
Great Britain, encompasses Northern
Ireland, whose border with the Repub-
lic of Ireland (a member in good stand-
ing of the European Union) has been
a major Brexit sticking point. And one
of the many shocking results of Brexit
is the rupture it has created between the
Tory Party and its unionist allies in
Northern Ireland, the defense of whom
has been a defining feature of British
conservatism. (The Party’s full name re-
mains the Conservative and Unionist
Party.) But O’Toole’s book focusses on
the distinction between Great Britain,
which includes Scotland and Wales, and
the England of his title—the real site
of the Tory uprising against Europe.
An essayist of uncommon depth and
breadth, O’Toole is a Dubliner known
for his work on Ireland. Describing the
complicated relationship between Irish-
ness and Englishness, he writes, “So we
had these two very different ways of
thinking about England: as the opposite
of Us and as a place where Us could mean
something much more fluid and open.”
His concern about a United Kingdom
severed from Europe, in turn, is that the
fluidity and the openness that have ap-
pealed to centuries of dissidents and cos-
mopolitans are going to vanish. Written
after the Brexit referendum but before
Johnson replaced Theresa May (who suc-
ceeded Cameron), “The Politics of Pain”
argues that the causes of the Brexit vote—
and the tribulations of Toryism—reach
back to the previous century.
The First World War ended with a
nascent American hegemony and strong
hints that Britain’s imperial days were
numbered. But in 1919 the United King-
dom held more territory than it had in- The situation looked bleaker in 1945,
at least from the perspective of those who
thought Britain’s destiny entailed ruling
over people across the world without their
consent. Britain emerged from the Sec-
ond World War at once victorious and
shrunken, the image of plucky heroism
and imperial twilight. “The power of
Brexit,” O’Toole writes, “is that it prom-
ised to end at last all this tantalizing un-
certainty by fusing these contradictory
moods into a single emotion—the plea-
surable self-pity in which one can feel at
once horribly hard done by and excep-
tionally grand. Its promise is, at heart, a
liberation, not from Europe, but from the
torment of an eternally unresolved conflict
between superiority and inferiority.”
Or, as Evelyn Waugh wrote in his
California-based satire of Anglo-Amer-
icanism, “The Loved One” (1948), “You
never find an Englishman among the
underdogs—except in England of
course.” India achieved independence in
1947, Jamaica in 1962; the great major-
ity of the Empire’s “subjects” won their
freedom in that fifteen-year interval. By
the time the Suez crisis concluded in
humiliating fashion, in 1956—when Pres-
ident Eisenhower forced an abrupt end
to the Anglo-French-Israeli military op-
eration to regain control of the canal—
American primacy, however resented,
could no longer be denied.
Dean Acheson’s famous remark, in
1962, that “Great Britain has lost an em-
pire and has not yet found a role” sug-
gests that striving to become a social de-
mocracy within Europe would somehow
have been an insufficiently glorious am-
bition for an erstwhile world power.
Acheson wasn’t alone: the debates that
galvanized the British in the first twen-
ty-five years after the war—whether to
join what was then called the European
Economic Community (no), whether to
develop an independent nuclear deter-
rent (yes), whether to devalue the pound
(yes, belatedly)—reflected an inability to
come to terms with a reduced status. The
country never entirely adjusted to being
a junior partner to America or a Euro-
pean member state. O’Toole, who argues
that ambivalence about joining the Eu-
ropean Community was intertwined with
enduring fears of German domination,
describes the “vertiginous fall from ‘heart
of empire’ to ‘occupied colony,’ ” and ob-
serves, “In the imperial imagination, there
are only two states: dominant and sub-
missive, colonizer and colonized.” (Con-
cerns about Germany making decisions
for other sovereign European countries
appear somewhat less paranoid in our
post-financial-crisis era.)
Hanging over all these issues was
Commonwealth immigration. In a su-
perb new study, “The Unsettling of Eu-
rope: How Migration Reshaped a Con-
tinent” (Basic), Peter Gatrell notes that,
in the postwar era, Irish immigration to
England “steadily began to yield in
significance to migration from other
parts of the world.” The British Nation-
ality Act of 1948 had allowed Common-
wealth citizens to relocate to the former
motherland. “Like their counterparts in
Paris or Marseille,” Gatrell writes, “peo-
ple who arrived from the Common-
wealth, and particularly from the Carib-
bean, spoke the language of the host
country, but stood out by virtue of their
skin colour.” Britain eventually passed
the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of
1968, which made it more difficult for
Commonwealth citizens, especially non-
white ones, to settle in Britain.T
his was also the year that Enoch
Powell, a Tory M.P. who repre-
sented Wolverhampton, delivered his
notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech.
Warning of the supposed dangers of
Commonwealth immigration, Powell
juxtaposed the “decent, ordinary fellow
Englishman” with “aliens,” and, allud-
ing to Virgil, added that, “like the Roman,
I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming
with much blood.’ ” The speech com-
pared proponents of anti-discrimina-
tion measures to the appeasers of an
earlier era. Powell quoted a constituent
who wanted to send his children abroad
for their safety, convinced that, “in fifteen
or twenty years’ time, the black man will
have the whip hand over the white man.”
Watching Britain let in so many immi-
grants of color, Powell went on, “is like
watching a nation busily engaged in
heaping up its own funeral pyre.”
Powell’s words and presence reso-
nated with many voters, but his open ex-
pression of racial contempt also spurred
outrage. (Leo Abse, a Welsh Labour M.P.
who brought to government an abiding
interest in psychoanalysis, claimed to
spot a connection between fears of Com-