Fintan O'Toole

In Heroic Failure, Fintan O'Toole undertakes a kind of cultural history of Brexit, arguing that the roots of this ongoing fiasco are far more complex and thoroughly embedded in the English national psyche than has generally been appreciated. I use the term 'English' here deliberately, since O'Toole argues that Brexit is essentially an English phenomenon. It's driven by a thwarted sense of English superiority in a post-Empire age and by the increasing failure of 'English' to remain an easy show more default synonym for 'British' in an age of devolved government, and shaped by a masochistic tendency to cling to the idea of failure and defeat as romantic proof of character.

In his introduction, O'Toole writes that he intends Heroic Failure to be neither unfriendly, gleeful, or superior in his look at what "zero-sum nationalism", as he terms it, has done to British politics and to English society. Yet I confess, as a fellow Irish person, to feeling more than a bit of schadenfreude while reading. What I'm saying is: come for the cultural analysis, stay for the surgical dissection of the feckless, racist Boris Johnson and his cronies. show less

After finishing We Don't Know Ourselves, I looked up the current history syllabus for the Leaving Cert (the state exam taken at the end of secondary education in Ireland). While it has changed in some ways from when I sat the exam in the '00s, the chronological terminus for the course seems roughly the same: you end the course with "Politics and society in Northern Ireland, 1949-1993" and "Government, economy and society in the Republic of Ireland, 1949-1989."

This boundary meant that show more there's a chunk of the history of the late 80s and early 90s I was very hazy about: events that happened too recently to have made it onto the history syllabus, but that had happened long enough ago I had only the haziest and most partial memories of them. As a small child, I remember pieces on the Six-One News about Ansbacher Cayman and the Beef Tribunals and Brown Envelopes and on and on, and having no idea what any of them meant or why they were such a big deal.

What I'm trying to say here is that reading the first few chapters of We Don't Know Ourselves, covering the 50s-70s filled me with all the old, expected anger—wildly misguided social and economic policies that forced emigration and separation on so many families, including mine; the industrial schools and the Magdalene Laundries; a photo of Dev literally genuflecting to kiss the ring of the odious John Charles McQuaid—I wasn't expecting to be as blindsided as I was during the chapters about my historical blindspot of the late 80s and early 90s.

Repeatedly as I was reading I felt the urge to call my parents and ask them "Did you truly know about all of this as it was happening? Were you aware? Were you talking about this with other people? What did people think about the hypocrisy and the corruption and the blatant fucking effrontery of it all?" It was revolting. Americans right now are—rightfully!—agog about George Santos and his sociopathic grifting, but we had an actual head of government who preached conservative Catholic morality and fiscal self-sacrifice while fucking the wife of a Supreme Court Justice and stealing money from the fund collected to pay for one of his closest friend's life-saving liver transplant.

Read that sentence back to yourself: what! the! fuck!

(We Don't Know Ourselves is an excellent argument, by the way, for revising the Leaving Cert History curriculum to go through at least the collapse of the boom. Teenagers today need to have a basic grasp of the sheer madness of the '00s/early '10s, because it's so fundamental to understanding the Ireland of the '20s and beyond. There's a good reason why O'Toole titles his chapter about the economic collapse as "Jesus Fucking Hell and God".)

Fintan O'Toole isn't aiming to write a comprehensive history of modern Ireland, so there is plenty that's left out or only touched on in passing. There are times when he labours a bit too much to fit everything into his organising theme of national knowing/willing unknowing, and I'm not sure it's such an exceptionally Irish thing as he presents it here. But these are relatively small quibbles, and the book as a whole is worth reading even if just for the cold and righteous anger with which O'Toole dissects the national culture of silence about child abuse and the sucking void of narcissistic hypocrisy that was Charles J. Haughey. show less

I’ve pointed out previously that main reason for Brexit is because Britain (or rather England) simply does not understand what the EU is about.

Johnson’s jokes about the EU and, Germany’s, and his expansionist plans, captures the general sense of distrust in England. I think the obsession with centralised power is really at the heart of Brexit and the British misunderstanding about the EU. And the reason for this misunderstanding is that British people seem to see the EU the same way show more that they saw the British empire or other European colonial empires. The single biggest difference between the EU and the previous European colonial empires (of which the British was one) was the degree of centralisation. The way the European colonial empires were set up was that all of the orders came from London, Madrid, Brussels and Lisbon and all resources and powers were repatriated back there. Eventually this level of piss taking caught up with the European powers who ended up going to war with each other and with their colonies. Between the two world wars most of these colonial powers, particularly Germany, were forced to realise a new humility. That humility has under-pinned most of the European co-operation since. The British Empire, to its credit, never really got its comeuppance. Therefore, there was never really a period of reflection. It's noticeable that most English people, in addition to their ignorance about the recent history in Northern Ireland, are also seemingly blissfully unaware of the British Empire's role in the build up to WW1. For them it was "Just them Germans doing what they do". We the Portuguese know all about large empires. Britain on the other hand, the largest empire at the time, was enjoying "Splendid Isolation", and was not stepping on anyone's toes. Large empires never step on toes.

Nobody can actually tell when the British Empire ended (I can tell you when the Portuguese Empire ended though). People cite WW2, the Suez Crisis and the return of Hong Kong to China. Indeed Brexit might be its end. Because of the empire went out with a whimper rather than a bang there was never really a moment to reflect on the good and the bad. Both are key. Brexit has shown up the lack of confidence some British people have in their own country and culture. When your national dish is curry then it's more difficult to identify what is that makes you British. And this complex has prevented Britain from taking a more active role in the EU. But the country that was the center of one of the greatest empires should be full of confidence. Equally however many British are completely unaware of the negative aspects of the empire and seem to think it was some kind benevolent conqueror rather than actively engaged in ethnic cleansings (like all empires).

The result is this kind of uneasy arrogance. Like the school bully who is abused at home. Britain is about to get a good kicking thanks to people, mainly English, whose sense of superiority has not caught up with realpolitik.

Johnson seeks to define Britain's relationship with the EU as a war. So for Tosser Johnson, the EU is the enemy and anyone who isn't on Johnson's side is a 'collaborator'. So, the English should get ready for food rationing. Johnson is a fucking idiot. I am proud to say I am a citizen of the world and a collaborator with the EU. Tosser Johnson does not speak for me. At the coming snap Brexit election, were I English, I’d vote for a party that would unambiguously support remaining in the EU. And so should all remainers.

Johnson has no intention of getting a deal. The deal that is acceptable to the Brexiter cultists does not and cannot exist, and is impossible to achieve because they are still fully immersed in their cake-ist delusion. The only option left for Johnson is to go for broke with a GE win by blaming the EU for not giving the British the cake that they voted for. By creating and repeating the same massive, but carefully focused, lie that No Deal is the fault of the EU they hope to attract enough of Brexit votes to get a majority. And given how easily fooled the leave voting public are he might very well win unless the opposition sort themselves out and stop their petty in fighting. show less

This is primarily a book about the rhetoric that was used in the referendum campaign by the proponents of "Leave", looking at the background and origin of the tropes used and the ways they worked with voters, as well as the reasons why the success of the campaign has been such an embarrassment to the Brexiteers, and why they can't possibly deliver whatever it was that the people voting for them were hoping for.

O'Toole writes from the point of view of a critical outsider with a sharp eye for show more literary and cultural subtexts and a long experience of the newspaper world. He lays into Boris Johnson's lies with gusto and obvious enjoyment (but still manages to underestimate Johnson's capacity for bouncing back from deep disgrace into public life...), whilst drawing interesting parallels between Johnson's style and that of Enoch Powell.

Whilst O'Toole is no enthusiast for the EU (he hasn't forgiven it for what it did to Greece, Ireland and Portugal after the financial crisis), he is clear that leaving it can be nothing other than a major act of self-harm for the UK. But intentional self-harm can be a very attractive thing in certain situations — he's at least half-serious when he draws a parallel with the popularity of Fifty shades of grey, and very serious when he argues that Brexit is the same kind of self-defeating rebellion as punk. When you feel powerless to change things, an act of self-harm puts you in a position to make yourself the centre of attention.

And of course this links into the English cult of heroic failure, which he sees as a way for a dominant, colonising nation to appropriate the moral high-ground of the colonial victims — the Charge of the Light Brigade, Scott of the Antarctic, Sir John Franklin and the North-West Passage, Michael Caine and the Zulus, etc. Johnson opportunistically took up "Leave" in the certainty that it would be a glorious flop and that his "selfless" engagement with it would earn him credit with a large section of the party. O'Toole quotes Sarah Vine's famous comment to her husband Michael Gove on the morning after the referendum: ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ — a line from The Italian job, a film whose relevance to Brexit O'Toole also has a lot of fun deconstructing.

The book concludes with a warning that the Leave vote overwhelmingly came from people who self-identify as "English" rather than "British", and who feel the current political system in the UK doesn't take any account of that identity. O'Toole urges politicians on the left and centre to find a way to talk to those people and take English nationalism away from the exclusive province of the far right before it's too late. Presumably his next book will be about how Jeremy Corbyn failed to do that... show less