HATRED, HYSTERIA AND LIES

How a feted novelist is spreading unhinged fake news and wants the UK to fail post-Brexit

SOMETIMES one reads an article in which everything is illuminated — all one’s suspicions, anxieties and fears. A light is cast on previously shadowy waters.

The novelist Julian Barnes has written such a piece for the London Review Of Books about Britain as it heads for Brexit. Though not a widely read publication, it is influential among the generally Left-leaning literary classes.

Barnes, it should be said, is the celebrated author of many novels. His 2011 work The Sense Of An Ending, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize for fiction, has been made into a film that opens tomorrow.

This is perhaps why — aware of the value of publicity — he has chosen this moment to grace the London Review Of Books with a diatribe that demonstrates the lack of proportionality, and the hysteria and hatred, evinced by the most extreme Remainers.

And also, most spectacularly, the piece reveals a susceptibility to what has recently become known as ‘fake news’ — but used to be called getting your facts wrong, or even telling a lie.

In the course of a sideswipe against the Mail — seemingly regarded by some Remainers as being single-handedly responsible for the Brexit vote last June — he makes an utterly false accusation.

Referring to the murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox a week before the referendum, Barnes claims the Mail ‘gave its readers 30 pages of more important news and comment before deigning to report Jo Cox’s murder’.

Charge

His insinuation is that this paper wished to downplay the murder of the pro-Remain Jo Cox by a deranged fascist. I’ve no doubt that, coming as it does from such an illustrious source, it is being repeated over a thousand fashionable dinner tables, and accepted as gospel truth.

But it’s not true. On June 17, 2016, the whole of the front page of the Mail was devoted to Jo Cox’s tragic murder. So were pages four, five, six and seven. The voluminous coverage was extremely sympathetic, even anguished.

So the eminent Julian Barnes has himself been guilty of disseminating ‘fake news’. The irony is that his incorrect charge should come after he has accused Brexiteers in the same article of purveying multiple lies.

Boris Johnson gets it in the neck over comments he made when explaining why EU countries would be foolish not to make trade deals with a post-Brexit Britain. Barnes criticises Johnson’s claim that Italy exports 300 million litres of prosecco a year to the UK, maintaining that the true figure is only 45 million.

Actually, one apparently authoritative retail website asserts it is 77 million litres, but let’s accept that Boris made a mistake, though it is surely true that the Italian prosecco industry will do whatever it can to ensure tariffs are not applied to its exports to Britain.

My suggestion is simply that Boris’s error pales into insignificance compared to Barnes’s downright falsehood. I don’t accuse him of a deliberate lie. Much more likely, this was laziness born of prejudice.

As a writer who started out in journalism, Barnes certainly ought to know that it is inconceivable that any national newspaper would virtually ignore the murder of an MP.

His article contains other illuminating nonsense. Having listed alleged eruptions of racism unleashed by the Brexiteers (‘the wall-daubings, the increase in racial abuse, the throwing of s**t at “foreign” women’), he makes the extraordinary disclosure that as a ‘largish’ white man he feels ‘ abashed when receiving nervous glances on pavements from smaller, less white women’.

May I suggest that, far from thinking that they are about to be assaulted by a hefty proBrexit 70- something thug, these women are throwing anxious glances in the direction of a plainly troubled man who provokes their sympathy?

On occasion, the novelist strays from fantasy into a kind of hate-filled negativity that ultra-Remainers who are politicians (e.g. Nick Clegg and Peter Mandelson) usually try to conceal. Barnes doesn’t.

Punished

He says he ‘hopes’ — his word — that ‘leading Brexiteers’ will be ‘ well punished’ by EU negotiators, that ‘Europe will make us stump up all we owe, that a hard Brexit will ensue, that the European Union will make us wait as long as Canada had to wait for a trade deal’.

Barnes also hopes that all those ‘who voted to quit the EU will discover that the bright new future without all those Poles and Romanians and Bulgarians means that they will now have to pick strawberries, grade potatoes and care for the demented. . . [and their wages] won’t be any higher.’

Here is a leading novelist who wants his fellow countrymen to suffer for having had the impertinence to vote for Brexit, and hopes that his country will be punished by Europe (which in his mind is indistinguishable from the EU). Do we call that plain nastiness, or does it bear the name of treachery?

Let me say that I have some grieving Remainer friends with whose concerns and worries I sympathise, though I do my best to allay them. But with the kind of unhinged and sometimes fact-free hatred shown by Julian Barnes, my only response is despair and disbelief.

It wouldn’t matter if he were a fool in a pub, but he is a feted writer, one of the most influential in Britain. Behind him are legions of less prominent intellectuals who will go on talking about Brexit as though it is the end of civilisation, while doubtless telling their friends the Mail barely covered the murder of Jo Cox.

Can we ever restore a measure of reason and proportionality to political debate in Britain, and, for that matter, America? Across the Atlantic, the revered and lofty New York Times has just published a mammoth article which suggests (without, of course, producing any hard facts) that London post-Brexit will no longer be a successful international city.

Though much less convulsed with loathing than Julian Barnes’s tirade, a piece by the reporter Sarah Lyall betrays the same sense of determination that everything will turn out badly. A succession of unhappy Remainers are encouraged to air their fears.

Needless to say, neither Barnes nor Lyall mentions that the apocalyptic warnings of Remainers during the referendum campaign — and I’d argue that many of those were plain lies — have not so far come to pass, and they do not address the possibility that their own intimations of doom may be even partly misguided.

Venomous

Both writers apparently live in a kind of intellectual bubble or echo chamber, talking to like-minded people, and not bothering to engage rationally with those with whom they disagree. In Julian Barnes’s case — so dissociated is he from the world around him — he actually imagines fears in non-white women passing in the street.

Surely the lesson of the referendum was that of the failure of the Remainers to understand and judge the public mood. I will spare Sarah Lyall, since she is an American, though she tells us that she lived in London for more than 15 years until returning home in 2013.

But Barnes, being British, is different. In common with so many of his kind, he does not like much of his country or many of his countrymen.

He and his ilk often portray those who voted to leave the EU as ‘insular’. Reading his venomous piece — its casual inaccuracies, its narrow prejudices, its rancour — that is the very word I would use to describe Julian Barnes.