As a rule it’s best to avoid heeding whatever Brendan O’Neill writes on his mercenary trollsite ‘Spiked’, particularly as he only says such monstrously silly things in order to get attention, rather like a toddler triumphantly upending its own potty. His cabal of junior psychopaths are so very keen to promote themselves as contrarian iconoclasts that (as I found when I happened to be in the building which hosts their office a few months ago) one of them apparently subscribes to a magazine dedicated to private car registration plates. Chortle, chortle, what japesters they must be.
The reason it’s worth briefly lingering in the fetid afterstench of O’Neill’s latest brainfart is suggested by Fintan O’Toole’s book ‘Unheroic Failures: Brexit and the politics of pain’, in which he convincingly argues that two perverse fantasies swirl inside the Brexit nightmare: one, that the UK actually lost the Second World War, and two, that Britain was actually the victim, not the protagonist, of its Empire. Anyone who’s remotely concerned about Brexit needs to get hold of a copy and and read up on the psychopathologies that led us to this sad, sorry, borderline suicidal point.
Another very great book on the subject of Ireland, England and identity, one which I read several decades ago, was Declan Kiberd’s ‘Inventing Ireland’, in which he makes the case that the UK’s perceptions of its neighbour and oldest colony consist of projections of those aspects it most dislikes and/or fears in its own character: venal, lazy, superstitious, whimsical, drunken, alternately violent and docile, etc. This odd dynamic meant that Oscar Wilde was able to satirise the affectations and mores of the English upper classes in a way that no English writer could have done.
The notion, then, that Ireland wants to go back to being a colony, to be dominated by a more powerful political entity, is a projection. There is, it seems, a wish buried in our national psyche, a desire far too traumatic to ever be openly confessed to, of which Brexit is a perverted expression: Britons do actually want to be slaves. It’s not a case of the UK elite wanting to regain the Empire, but rather to relive it as reviled, humiliated and abject – as the Irishman O’Toole says, and the Englishman O’Neill would (pathologically) deny, the British (or at least the English) are not nostalgic for glory and heroically chasing their destiny, but rather drowning in resentment and craving self-pity.
Now given that this is exactly the sort of no-holds-barred contrarian hot-take that Spiked are celebrated for, it can only be a matter of hours til it appears on their front page. After all, they love free speech and challenging their readers almost as much as they do private car number plates. Amiright, “Breandán”?!
In Sheffield as of 1987 anyone walking through the shopping precinct in the centre of town ran a gauntlet of left-wing newspaper sellers. The 14-year-old me often generally managed to avoid handing over 30p or so of my hard-earned paper round money for Socialist Worker, but on occasion I found myself buttonholed by some garrulous and well-presented young people pushing a publication called ‘The Next Step’. None of them appeared to be local, and they were, by comparison with their competitors, refreshingly unconcerned with whatever workers’ struggles were going on in South Yorkshire at the time. I didn’t get the ideological distinctions between the Revolutionary Communist Party, as they were called, and the Socialist Workers, but I suspect that the way they responded whenever I asked about such things – they were more than happy to slag off their rivals on the left – appealed to my disaffected sensibilities and inchoate contrarian instincts. I started going to meetings at which they pressed a copy of Lenin’s ‘What is to be done’ on me, and also made me shell out for a copy of a book called ‘Moral Panics’, which I did read and found splenetically entertaining if sometimes puzzling at the level of basic logical argumentation.
Infinite Coincidence 
