35
in 2016, overshadowed any serious
discussion of the E.U.’s role as a long-
term peacekeeper and facilitator of
supra national cooperation. That the
myth’s wise cracking originator could
soon be Prime Minister shows how
fundamentally unserious British pol-
itics has become since then.
Another figure from outside the
mainstream of British politics has stepped into the void cre-
ated by May’s departure— Farage, the former U.K. Indepen-
dence Party leader hailed as “Mr. Brexit” by President Donald
Trump. This shrewd political operator doesn’t bother much
with the minutiae of policy detail but aims to reach his follow-
ers at a deeper, more powerful gut level through beery, blokeish
plain speaking. Farage staged a series of Trump-style rallies up
and down the country this spring stoking the resentment of
voters bored and frustrated by the intractability of the Brexit
process—and won his new Brexit Party first place in the Euro-
pean election in the process. The narrative of betrayal Farage
likes to cloak in his saloon-bar rhetoric is dangerous in Brit-
ain’s current febrile atmosphere; the xenophobic energies un-
leashed by the 2016 campaign, according to the government,
led to a 41% spike in hate-crime offenses in the month follow-
ing the referendum. This lingering trend has contributed to
the rise of far-right figureheads like Stephen Yaxley-Lennon,
an anti-Islam agitator who goes by the name Tommy Robinson
and whose public appearances have
stirred up unrest. Feelings also run
high on the Remain side, although
March’s People’s Vote rally, a hun-
dreds of thousands–strong pro-
E.U. protest in central London,
passed without violence, and anti-
Farage protesters have adopted the
tactic of dousing him with milk-
shakes (the especially thick ver-
sion from U.S. burger chain Five
Guys being the variety of choice).these incidents testify to the
bitterness of Britain’s current po-
litical deadlock. Still stunned by
the referendum result, and cowed
by the way it was talked up in the
media as an overwhelming man-
date, our political class remains
paralyzed by its own commitment
to delivering the undeliverable.
And so here we are. The U.K. is ex-
pected to leave the E.U. on Oct. 31.
Nobody is any clearer as to what
form this exit will take, or who will
be the Prime Minister that oversees
it. Meanwhile, all the resentments
that lay behind the vote continue to
bubble away unaddressed.
Through creativity, humor and
a certain sleight of hand, the ar-
chitects of the Olympic opening
ceremony presented, that night
in 2012, a vision of Britishness
around which most of the coun-
try felt they could unite. But it
was a fleeting moment, and an il-
lusory one. What the referen-
dum revealed was probably much
more truthful: A country at war with itself. A country di-
vided along lines of age, education, wealth and opportunity;
a country seen quite differently by the old and the young; a
prickly union in which provincial England had a very differ-
ent sense of identity from metropolitan England, and felt lit-
tle of the sense of “Europeanness” that Scotland, for instance,
expressed strongly through its votes to stay in the E.U. Asked,
on June 23, 2016, what kind of collective identity it wanted
to assert, the U.K. replied with one loud, clear, unanimous
voice: “We don’t know.”
In a strange way, David Cameron did the U.K. a backhanded
favor in calling his referendum. We may have no answers to the
core, intractable questions that the referendum raised about
our culture, national identity and sense of belonging. But at
least, now, we have begun to talk about them.Coe is a London-based writer whose new novel, Middle
England, will be published in the U.S. on Aug. 20Our political class
remains paralyzed
by its commitment
to delivering
the undeliverable