Brexit babble! It’s time to grow up and mind the language
SOMETIMES the language of our politics bears no relation to what we are supposed to be debating. If you want your Brexit to be filled with figures called Fritz, Tommy and Paddy, for example, and fancy referring to European neighbours as amphibians, Tory MP Mark Francois could be the man for you.
He acts as a kind of Batman to Brexiteer-in-chief Jacob ReesMogg and his regiment of supporters, and was mightily miffed this week when Tom Enders, the German chief executive of Airbus, said Brexit might lead to the company pulling out of the UK.
Mr Francois – never to be confused with Francais – took to our television screens to rip up a piece of paper upon which the words of Mr Enders were written, and declared: ‘My father, Reginald Francois, was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German and neither will his son.’
We will always be grateful for the sacrifice of men and women such as Reginald Francois and the tens of thousands of Americans, Australians, Canadians, Belgians, Britons, Dutch, French, Czechs, Greeks, New Zealanders, Norwegians and Poles who fought beside him.
But surely Mr Francois Jr can see a few differences here.
The Wehrmacht were doing a tad more than ‘bully’ his father on those Second World War Normandy beaches. They were trying to kill him, not give him an economic forecast. They were a bad thing.
Airbus employs 6,500 people in the UK and thousands of others in the supply chain, in high-end manufacturing jobs. That’s a good thing.
BUT 80 years since the Nazis started the war, Mr Francois cannot stop mentioning it. He is fighting a Commando Comics version of Brexit, desperate to deliver the line: ‘For us, Fritz, the EU is over.’ It is a politics where caricature trumps case, prejudice is louder than proposition. In this world, principles can be very moveable.
Mr Rees-Mogg sees Brexit as restoring British democracy and Westminster as the ‘mother of all parliaments’. Until that is, it looks like he is going to be defeated in the House of Commons, in which case he argues that the Queen should prorogue it, or close it down. Time for ‘mother’ to be put in a home for a while until she learns to agree with him.
But the politics of caricature is not restricted to certain Brexiteers. When the SNP decided to side with the Catalan administration that held an illegal referendum on separation from Spain, leading Scottish Nationalists compared the Spanish government to General Franco’s regime, a disgusting insult both to modern Spain and to Franco’s hundreds of thousands of victims.
Comparing the Spain of 2019 to that of Franco is out of the same book that gives the German chief executive of Airbus equivalence to the Wehrmacht. The SNP still wear Margaret Thatcher’s name as an exorcist wears a garlic necklace and yet she came to office nearly 40 years ago. Go back another 40 years in SNP history and you find a very different party. Some of the SNP leadership would not be on the same side as Reginald Francois.
If politics is a game where all of that can be dredged up instead of ideas, then you end up talking about Normandy beaches when you should be talking about jobs. If we are not careful, that could be a lasting damage of Brexit.
In these last nine weeks of EU membership, with a deal still eluding us, there is talk of JeanClaude Juncker and Michel Barnier making concessions and ‘blinking first’ as though they were the weak ones in a children’s game.
THOSE men are not drunken caricatures, they are the leaders of 450 million people and they have dealt with Brexit more professionally than the UK Government has. Ireland cares only about Britain’s interests in as far as they are good for Ireland. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has been every inch the European leader fighting his country’s corner better than the current occupant of Downing Street has fought ours.
Perhaps even Brexiteers such as Mr Francois should acknowledge that the ‘Paddies’ don’t play like ‘Paddies’ any more; that ‘Fritz’ deserves our respect.
Because if our relationship with Europe is still going to be determined by a war fought by braver men than him, alongside our European neighbours, then we will not have much of a relationship at all.
We’ll be what the comics call ‘Johnny No Mates’.