Sometimes a cartoon says it all. In last week’s NS (page 19), Grizelda showed two small children in floods of tears, wailing, “We don’t want to live in historic times!” as their startled parents looked on. I was reminded of last year’s Political Quarterly lecture by the Irish writer Fintan O’Toole. While Ireland over the past two decades has been “trying to awake from the epic into the ordinary, from the gloriously simple into the fluidly complex”, England, he said, was trying to reverse that process. Brexit was an attempt to move “from the ordinary into the epic, from the complex to the gloriously simple, from the openness and contingency of real life into a once-for-all moment of destiny”.
How surprising that it needs a Daily Mail columnist to pour a large bucket of cold water over all this destiny nonsense. Once a passionate supporter of Brexit, the Mail’s Peter Oborne has just repented in an long and eloquent article on the Open Democracy website, written after much agonising. With the trickle of companies planning to leave Britain now turning into a flood, the economic arguments for Brexit, he writes, are “now unsustainable”. Leaving the EU, Oborne argues, “will be as great a disaster for our country as the over-mighty unions were in the 1960s and 1970s” – quite an admission from a lifelong right-winger.
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