Look to the Future Now - It's only Just Begun...
Thursday, 23 June, 2016
Thursday, 23 June, 2016
I went to a brass band concert last Saturday evening. It
took place in a heritage centre down the hill from our village. I think this
probably makes me a bad person.
But wait - I should begin,
as Kenneth Williams probably said in that lost 1975 masterpiece Carry On Up the Referendum, by laying out my credentials.
I’m old, white, male. A husband, father and grandfather. A
card-carrying member of the Labour Party.
Not Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. A lifelong Guardian reader.
I heard my Dad talk repeatedly in the early ‘70s about the
theoretical virtues of world government. Like millions of others, he had served
for six years in World War II. More singularly than most, he had reached the
conclusion that the only way to avoid such conflicts in future lay in making
common cause. He voted enthusiastically in Harold Wilson’s EEC referendum to
stay in Europe - and so did I.
I’m a Remainer to this day.
But I’ve been much struck throughout - and particularly lately
- by the desolate, threadbare nature of debate on both sides of the argument. So
great a matter. Such a puny level of engagement and leadership by the
politicians. So many lazy lies and venomous half-truths.
Most journalism has been like trench warfare. Predictable
and fruitless, rancid with the smell of space-filling gas and the echo of
foam-flecked orders from proprietor-generals behind the lines we read. The BBC
and other media have been hobbled by the arid demands of impartiality. Meanwhile,
Facebook continues to publish pictures of cats and Twitter has demonstrated
that sewers can be electronically pure but still horribly unclean to the nth
human degree.
All of this – and a shattering added component of
jaw-dropping tragedy – has produced a harsh dislocation among us which to me looks
possibly beyond repair, regardless of who wins today. I’ve recently seen the divide
described like this: -
Leavers are xenophobic, insular,
narrow-minded, self-regarding, racist, confused, brainless, extremist, hateful,
economically-illiterate, un-Christian Little-Englanders and swivel-eyed
conspiracy theorists.
Remainers are sneering, aloof,
arrogant, vicious, supercilious, evil, unhinged, hypocritical, ageist, lying,
duplicitous, cavalier, collaborators, traitors and bullies.
Charles Sorley, a little
over a century ago, was strangely prescient: -
And some are mounted on
swift steeds of thought
and some drag sluggish feet of
stable toil.
Yet all, as though they furiously
sought,
twist turn and tussle, close and
cling and coil.
Odd, therefore, in the midst of this mighty threshing about
that I find myself irritatedly hung up on the transient words of a low-level
one-trick newspaper columnist (the trick is, as someone had it, “passing
insults off as wit”) – A A Gill of the Sunday
Times.
Two middle-aged youngsters on my Facebook timeline have
posted and commended as admirable a recent longish piece by him on the virtues
of Remain. A A Gill
is 62 and therefore not an obvious poster-boy for the fading young. He’s the
man who wrote that Mary Beard’s physical appearance put her “this far from
being the subject of a C4 documentary.” He meant The Undateables. He’s the
man who referred to Clare Balding in a television review as “the dyke on a
bike.” He’s the man who is Jeremy Clarkson’s best friend. Just a bit of context
there…
But old A A is actually in my camp and boy, did he tear into
those pesky Brexiteers. Here’s a taste: -
“We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s
snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug,
nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its
fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England,
really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where
we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and
gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian
country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If,
no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a
cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than
Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will
never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.”
“This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the
Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John
Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and
Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.”
“There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the
EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young
aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve
mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for
them.”
You begin to see how
A A has made me start to doubt myself. After all, I’m demonstrably old. I quite
like the odd bit of nostalgia. I kind of do think it’s unlikely that rivals to
Shakespeare and Dickens will emerge anytime ever. I revere the memory of Barnes
Wallis and his bouncing bomb, not to mention Richard Todd playing Guy Gibson,
not to mention the Dam Busters March. And to me, cottage gardens are beyond
beautiful. A A doesn’t mention brass bands in his roll of infamy but the
Grimethorpe Colliery boys and girls did play Nimrod on Saturday evening, and
it’s likely that Elgar is somewhere on his little list. And then he hits me with these killer
left-right combinations; peak Blighty;
Bisto nostalgia. No hope for me. I’m
on the floor, crawling brokenly towards my saviours, my true buddies, in
Brexit, where I obviously belong. I clearly don’t have any right to love Europe
and want success for the EU.
He’s vicious and
funny, contemptuous and dismissive in the default mode which is his trademark.
Clearly he makes some Remainers – like my two wrinkled semi-youths - feel warm
inside. After all, Brexiteers are all like Farage, aren’t they? Braying, angry
hate machines, none without a semi- coherent Nazi thought, all definitely
thinking that If is the best poem ever written and each one needing to be
shovelled aside with no afterthought as Remain advances to sunlit glory.
Gill’s writing is
symptomatic of a deepening tendency in politics in favour of the laddish bludgeon.
But I don’t believe this kind of cheap hustling for a cause is useful. It’s not
useful because it makes simplicity from complexity. It kills the possibility of
dialogue in favour of irreversible hammer blows and abuse. It sets up ingrained
enemies and denies the possibility of understanding and reconciliation. It’s a
version of demagoguery as rancid as anything Farage produces but the difference
is that Farage is, for good or ill, serious. Gill is a bully who does it for a
laugh.
I suppose the lesson
is that both sides have pernicious
bombasticos among their cohorts and that full-throttle campaigning will
always produce scraped knees and bruised knuckles. But I think we need to
overlay the referendum question with another. How will we calm ourselves down
and get back in tolerant step together after Thursday? Whatever the decision,
it’ll stick. And we have to live with it – and one another.
So I’ll keep with my
nostalgia and brass bands and Barnes Wallis if you don’t mind. And quite out of
A A Gill’s expectation, I’ll vote Remain today with an ancient, wizened
heart – valuing the past but looking to the future.
Any passing hipsters
fancy a sesh with the DVD of Brassed Off
and a flagon of Sanatogen over ice?
