The Blue Flower

The referendum seems to have revealed a similar kind of dialectic as between the North and South of the United States. After Brexit? The Referendum and Its Discontents by Scott Stephens offers some acute analyses of the referendum of last week. I have been brought to believe that the referendum should never have taken place – and that the EU needs profound reforms or to be destroyed and replaced with something new.

One such opinion is from John Milbank of the Radical Orthodoxy school:

Christians are duty bound for theological and historical reasons to support the ever closer union of Europe (which does not imply a superstate) and to deny the value of absolute sovereignty or the lone nation-state. Tragically, the Reformation, Roundhead, nonconformist, puritan, whig, capitalist, liberal version of Britishness last night triumphed over our deep ancient character which is Catholic or Anglican, Cavalier, Jacobite, High Tory or Socialist. The spirit of both Burke and Cobbett has been denied by the small-minded, bitter, puritanical, greedy and Unitarian element in our modern legacy. Unfortunately it has duped the working classes, once again to their further ruination.

One commenter on this article expressed surprise that someone of the intellectual calibre of John Milbank should equate the Brussels dinosaur (my expression) with the “high” view. That question is debatable. We would need to ask him. Apart from that, Milbank seems to have come up with an idea of two Englands that has always fuelled my own pilgrimage in life.

I was born in Kendal at the south end of the Lake District, a small market town where my parents settled in the late 1950’s when my father found his opportunity to join the local veterinary surgeon in partnership. As I grew up, I had the impression of stick-in-the-mud conservatism in attitudes. Older people kept the young at a distance with the old idea that age brought privilege. Kendal is a predominantly Protestant town with I don’t know how many denominations: one RC parish dating from the early nineteenth century, the main parish church with an excellent musical tradition and a “Prayer Book Catholic” ethos. I was in the choir there from 1975 to 1976. St George’s is quite high with its fine Edwardian chancel and St Thomas’ (where I was baptised) is rock-bottom low. They still had north-end celebration in the 1970’s but now it just has the big screen and the place for the “praise band”. There are many pentecostal and independent evangelical communities. High church worship has never been of much appeal to Kendal people. As the years went by, young Kendal folk modernised and followed the trends of fashion, consumption, smartphones and all the rest. The Lake District voted for staying in the EU, in spite of the conservatism I knew as a child.

I went to school in York and worked there for a few years before going to London in 1978. Yorkshire seemed to be less “closed” than Westmorland and Lancashire. Older people saw young people as the future, and there were more opportunities for things that interested me like church music. There was also the difference between a cathedral city and the smaller and industrial towns producing coal or mint cake.

What now remains of the revolution of the mid seventeenth century? Milbank opposes the two sides he finds implicit in our attitudes today. The USA still has its Yankees and Red-necks reflecting the two sides of the Civil War. I meet people occasionally who seem to come from another planet. No thought is shared in common. Having lived in France for so long, I see the same dividing lines between the revolutionary republican and those who look to the old medieval order as survived until 1789. It is the dividing line between the Classicist and the Romantic. Surely we all have both head and heart!

Perhaps this is one reason why there needs to be cooperation at a cultural level, not merely economical, financial and business. These splits need to be understood and worked on from the point of view of diversity and tolerance. This fundamental divide is everywhere, not least Russia or any country that had experienced a violent reformation or revolution. The cracks have certainly appeared in England as people voted more with the guts than with their heads.

England has been a very stable country since about the eighteenth century, and shone in contrast to the upheavals in France and much of Europe in the nineteenth century. The Empire was at its height in the Victorian era, and was finally destroyed after World War II, the 1960’s and the return of Hong Kong to China. Our industrial production is only a shadow of what it was until the 1960’s. Perhaps it is England’s turn to know such upheavals and accounts to be settled between lying and treacherous politicians, “ordinary” people and those more motivated by culture and humanism than brute money.

In spite of the differences, I see a common trunk of culture in the whole of Europe. England’s music in the eighteenth century was deeply influenced by Italy. England was not all puritanical but assimilated Latinitas as a part of its quiet and reserved Renaissance. France was never far away. My own family was very Germanophile before World War I. The damage done by those two wars is incalculable quite apart from the massive loss of human life and the destruction of our culture. Europe is something real and desperately needed to reconcile the two Englands and the two Europes, the two Russias and the north and south of the United States. I hardly see this with the present EU which is all about collecting and wasting gigantic amounts of money, the scandalous waste of foodstuffs on a huge scale and dictating over us in the tiniest details of safety standards and piffling details.

Certainly, in the same way as I sought something beyond 1970’s Kendal, the heart needs to be open and eager to soar with inspiration and imagination. Wordsworth leapt with joy with the changes in France – until he saw the stinking carts of headless corpses. We truly need philosopher kings – not bankers and billionaire grippes-sous. We need a completely new constitution of principles, a new social and human contract.

Perhaps we are at the brink of something great, or the greatest catastrophe to befall humanity. Sometimes, a good shake-up can bring a lot of good.

This morning, I received an e-mail from a friend. He writes from a conservative point of view, one that historians would qualify as isolationist. Will this latest move bring about a dissolution of the present political establishment built on masculine power, money and lies? Will we see the radiant dawn of principled politics with the Common Good in view? Would we see the end of cultural Marxism and “political correctness” founded on the principles of Frankfurt critical theory?

Will we see a resurgence of nationalism like at the end of World War II or in the heyday of the Empire under Queen Victoria or during the period preceding World War I? I have the impression that we are reading too much into things. Do we really want Donald Trump, Mme Le Pen or Farange? Is that really what we want? We are warned about the succession of Scotland and Northern Ireland, the breakup of the United Kingdom. The first thing parents ask a teenager who wants to leave home is whether he has a job, something to live on and decent digs. It is said that the Empire subsists in the form of London’s City banks, but is that true? The era of top hats, moustaches and snuff boxes seems to be over!

We are buffeted and swayed by politicians and medias who don’t seem to know more about it than we do. I have felt for many years that the hitherto quagmire needed to be broken. What will we get under nationalism? Perhaps a good dose of Trump, Le Pen, UKIP, etc. – and then chop their heads off to find something new. All most Frenchmen have to say is how odd the English are for things like eating Marmite and for having beaten Napoleon! Not very helpful!

Most serious analysis attributed the success of Brexit to nationalism and the ham-fisted way the waves of immigrants are being handled. No one can afford them, and Europeans in need are pushed further to the back of the queue as Syrians, Afghans, Turks, etc. get first service and rich pickings. I am definitively “exiled” because I could never afford a house in England, not even something grotty in the north-east. One problem I see if how the UK can afford independence without the old Empire plundered from everyone who now wants to come and colonise England.

I look to the first major cracks in the EU monolith. Perhaps we will live our very own 1989 (I was 30 when it all happened in Germany and eastern Europe). It is an Orwellian monster, and would eventually become a dystopia if left unchecked. We are losing money over the plunge of the pound Sterling.

Will this cause mainstream British politics to go back to the 1930’s and Winston’s bulldogs and Department of Dirty Tricks under the pavements of Whitehall? I doubt it. We can’t expect too much unless we are truly at the gates of a revolution. Usually, when revolutions happen, heads roll, and we have to be careful that those heads in the baskets won’t be ours!

In brief, I am not triumphalistic. We have to wait and see what happens. The political elite might just ignore the result of the referendum and it would be business as usual with Brussels. There could be a big backlash against the right-wing Conservatives and nationalists and we go back to the 1970’s and everything on strike like with Callaghan and Wilson (when I was in my early teens). All over Europe, it is up and down, mostly chickening out at the last moment from bringing back right-wing nationalism. Indeed, where is it all going?

These are momentous times or one big boring anti-climax.

Let’s just keep our eyes and ears open.

It would seem strange if I said nothing on this subject a day before the referendum. I can’t vote because expatriates who have not lived in the UK for more than fifteen years lose the right to vote. The matter seems to be one of debate – but that’s how it is at present. I don’t have the vote!

I have already expressed ideas, in the sense of the UK leaving the EU, mostly influenced by nationalistic ideas and a notion that the EU was becoming a kind of Orwellian Big Brother. We are being told different things on the media, and I am so confused about the issues. Some are lying to protect their self-interest. Others are saying what they believe to be the truth, but may be confused as most of us ordinary folk are.

As I understand it, the EU was intended to put an end to European wars as well as rationalise trade and the use of money. I have heard it said that it was intended to be a kind of “United States of Europe”. America has been the land of opportunity and freedom to make one’s living through work and practice any religion according to one’s conscience. On reading some sources, the USA now frightens me. To what extent is the EU the vassal of the USA and the various power elites?

If England leaves the EU, we might face a break-up of the United Kingdom. Our old Empire has not existed outside a few token islands here and there since World War II. We would have to live on what we can sell on the world’s market, with industry being but a shadow of what it was. Politics may go back to the rhetoric of Churchill and Thatcher – maybe that of Trump! Maybe that would be a good thing, perhaps a dangerous illusion of British triumph. Housing would become no more affordable. The NHS might go the way of private American health insurance. Those with all the money will have a free hand, and life might become very difficult for workers and poor people. I am afraid as many others are.

I am no longer sure of anything. Nationalism showed many ugly fruits in the twentieth century, and the world said “never again” as the Nazi concentration camps were liberated in 1945. I could see small federations of even smaller states like the Swiss cantons. I like the idea of breaking up the gigantic bureaucracies to make life more human and democratic. Is that only a vain dream?

Perhaps dissident elements need to work for the destruction of the present EU structures before they become something like the old Soviet Union. That rather than individual countries leaving and leaving the rest intact. That is the anarchist in me speaking…