Eurocrats tell the English nationalists to 12-step up

Declan Lynch

IN the language of rehab, they call it an “intervention” — the moment when a person is informed by well-meaning friends or relations that they are no longer connected to reality in any meaningful sense, and that they need treatment.

That visit by the Eurocrats to Downing Street — in which they informed Theresa May that, contrary to many of the assertions of the Brexiteers, Britain would not, in fact, be able to retain most of the advantages of EU membership, while getting rid of the bits they don’t like — seemed to be coming from some interventionist playbook, from a place of “tough love”. Without the love.

Nationalism, like alcoholism, can leave you needing such unpleasantness. And while you may despise the interventionists on the day, you may eventually come to realise that there was truth in what they were saying, and only self-delusion in your version of events.

And the first step of any 12-step programme, is the classic formula that “we admitted that we were powerless over our addiction, that our lives had become unmanageable”.

Now, of course, the British government hasn’t admitted anything of the sort, because at the moment it is too far gone into the arena of the unwell, and, anyway, there’s an election going on.

So it has fallen to broken-down old men like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine to speak sadly of this powerlessness, this unmanageability.

“Hezza” is particularly strong on the powerlessness, virtually weeping on the Channel 4 News as he marvelled at the essential barminess of it, how the triumphant Brexiteers have, in truth, left Britain horribly at the mercy of whatever Jean-Claude Juncker and all the other Jean-Claudes decide is good for them.

And as for the unmanageability, both he and Ken Clarke can recall a time when men such as Iain Duncan Smith were (even in a Tory Party full of undesirables) seen as too obviously unhinged to cause too much trouble.

That the vision of the Duncan Smiths is now the official policy of the government of Great Britain must seem particularly outrageous to those who knew them simply as “the bastards”.

In another age too, before the darkness of nationalism descended on the body politic of the UK, there might have been a way out of the hole, the ancient patterns of democracy would have offered an opposition party which was capable of stepping in for a while and managing the situation in some sort of a grown-up fashion.

Except now the Labour Party is led by Jeremy Corbyn, the sort of man you would not send to the shop for a bottle of milk, let alone to “Europe” to negotiate some safe route through the wreckage which has been accumulating during this prolonged frenzy of national self-destruction.

Indeed Corbs can himself be regarded as a creature so damaged by just about everything in the abysmal political life he has led, that any well-run rehab facility would view him not as a contributor to the recovery of the addict, but as an enabler.

Into this place of the damned, step the Eurocrats — the well-meaning interventionists who are not even all that well-meaning, but who are able to observe this race of people who were once famously pragmatic, but are now struggling to form a coherent thought without descending into senseless babble.

True to their mission, they did not mess around. They went through all the ways in which the Brexiteers had been fooling themselves, and fooling the people. They spoke of a prime minster living, not on planet Mars, “but rather in a galaxy very far away”. And the image of Juncker pulling two large piles of paper from his bag (Croatia’s EU entry deal and Canada’s free trade deal) bore another strong resemblance to the moment in an intervention when the alcoholic might be presented with a bunch of testimonies from various injured parties, telling tales of drunkenness and cruelty.

Indeed, the position of Britain throughout this desperate business has been quite similar to that of the alcoholic who realises up to a point that there’s a bit of a problem to be overcome here — but who would still like to keep drinking all the same, at weekends.

So they want to leave the EU, but not in a way that makes much difference to their lives. There will be Brexit, but really there will be no Brexit. And for the enforcers of the EU, ideally there would be no Brexit either. It’s just that they are making it abundantly clear, that for this to happen, it would help if Britain doesn’t actually leave said EU.

Which on the whole, is a reasonable enough position, whereas the Tories are under the impression that they can leave the EU, amid scenes of wild self-congratulation, but that the EU won’t leave them. Because the EU would be “mad” to do that, right?

Ah yes, they know this well in the rehab game — the way that the client, lost in denial, is able to maintain the illusion that everyone else is wrong, or just has an attitude problem.

So now the professionals have moved in, to tell these English nationalists what time it is. To let them know that they can keep drinking from the proverbial Brexitbottle, if that is how they roll. But that they will be drinking alone.

‘Corbyn is the sort of man you wouldn’t send to the shop for milk, let alone to Europe ’