#remoaner

[justforbooks]

Middle England by Jonathan Coe

Reactionaries and remoaners clash in a meditation on anger, loss and the passing of time featuring the characters from The Rotters’ Club

At one point in Middle England, a couple attend a marital counselling session in which they are each asked to explain why they are so angry that their spouse voted differently from them in the EU referendum. One complains that the other, by voting leave, showed that “as a person, he’s not as open as I thought he was. That his basic model for relationships comes down to antagonism and competition, not cooperation.” Her husband answers that her remain vote made him realise she’s “very naïve”, “lives in a bubble”, and that it gives her “an attitude of moral superiority”.

The therapist’s verdict is: “What’s interesting about both of these answers is that neither of you mentioned politics. As if the referendum wasn’t about Europe at all. Maybe something much more fundamental and personal was going on. Which is why this might be a difficult problem to resolve.”

That, perhaps, is the sore point a novelist taking on Brexit as a subject might be expected to probe. There’s a truth here – that the Brexit vote was experienced and has continued to be experienced as a matter of personal identity. For a novelist, this is where the action is.

Middle England is the third novel featuring the characters from Coe’s 2001 novel The Rotters’ Club and 2004’s The Closed Circle, and sees an excellent writer making an enjoyable, absorbing and less than completely successful attempt to find the sweet spot of that sore point. The action runs from the spring of 2010 to the autumn of 2018, and the newsreel that unrolls in the background takes in Gordon Brown’s encounter with “that bigoted woman”, the coalition government, the London riots, the murder of Jo Cox, Nigel Farage’s notorious “Breaking Point” poster, the London Olympics and all the rest of it. And in that respect, of course, we know what’s going to happen because we’re living it. This is a book that foretells the present.

It also has a good deal to tell us, oddly, about geography and local transport. Coe has frequent resort to the melancholy poetry of place. On page four we read that the hero is driving “through the towns of Bridgnorth, Alveley, Quatt, Much Wenlock and Cressage”, and 40 pages later he’s taking the route in the other direction: “Cressage, Much Wenlock, Bridgnorth, Enville, Stourbridge and Hagley”. A garden centre isn’t just “midway between Shrewsbury and Birmingham”: it’s “not far from the M54 and considered such a geographical fixture that it had its own official sign on the motorway”. A pub is “tucked away in a hard-to-find corner beside the Suffolk Street Queensway in Central Birmingham”. At one point we meet characters “driving out of Birmingham along the A3400”; at another contemplating the “rail replacement service between Kettering and Nuneaton” “‘Rail replacement service’, ‘Kettering’, ‘Nuneaton’. Were there five more dispiriting words in the English (or any other) language?”

In its politics, just as in its gripes about public transport, this is a great big Centrist Dad of a novel. It lives largely in the world of the media, academia, politics and (peripherally) the City. Benjamin Trotter is a failed novelist who in late middle age finds himself longlisted for the Man Booker prize; his old friend Doug is a well-heeled centre-left newspaper columnist; his niece Sophie is a university lecturer who becomes a minor TV don. The book has a wide cast of characters, though the ones we’re invited to sympathise with are pretty much all remainers.

And yet it’s never stronger or more convincing than when it’s furthest from political events. As the novel addresses the rise of populism, for example, we meet reactionary oldies in golf clubs moaning about “political correctness”; a lunatic conspiracy theorist buttonholing a publisher with a manuscript about the EU’s “Kalergi Plan” for white genocide; a porcine chancer funding the referendum through a dodgy free-market thinktank; an elderly former car worker uncomprehendingly contemplating the site where the Longbridge plant used to be; a privileged Corbynite student lodging a complaint against a lecturer after hearing (at second hand) that they’d said something to a trans student that could be taken the wrong way. They tell us, in caricatural form, what we already know – or at least suppose we do.

One problem is that the historical scaffolding is so familiar, and yet will date so fast; this means that certain passages of exposition feel clunky. The reader in 2018 has no need to be told the following:

Jeremy Corbyn had become leader of the Labour Party in September. The surprising – even astonishing – election of this obscure but long-serving, rebellious backbencher had been seen by many, including Sophie, as a welcome sign that the party was planning to return to the principles it had abandoned under Tony Blair.

The reader in 2028 might welcome the reminder. The reader in 2038 will struggle to give a damn. The reader in 3018 may eke a PhD out of it.

To give Middle England its due, it doesn’t aim to cover everything, recognising wanly that, in drink, the conversation will broaden out “to include Brexit, Donald Trump, Syria, North Korea, Vladimir Putin, Facebook, immigration, Emmanuel Macron, the Five Star Movement and the contentious result of the Eurovision song contest in 1968”. So the American elections are dispatched, wittily, in two lines:

Finally, Benjamin said: “I don’t like Trump, do you?” “Nope,” Charlie said. “Can’t stand the bloke.” Benjamin nodded. With the political discussion out of the way …

And it is when the political discussion is out of the way that the novel becomes richer and less schematic. There’s Sophie’s odd-couple relationship with her driving instructor husband Ian (they met on a speed awareness course) and the way she thinks and rethinks an adulterous near-miss at the beginning of their marriage. There’s Benjamin’s relationship with his sister Lois and his long-lost schoolfriend Charlie, now working as a children’s entertainer and locked in a feud with a rival clown. And there’s Benjamin’s journey towards self-understanding and acceptance. All these are done with real style and feeling.

Coe’s writing is as smoothly accomplished as ever. His comic set pieces – funerals, dinners, clown fights – and scenes capturing the affectionate and ridiculous sex of middle age, and a relationship between a journalist and a Yes Minister-style government adviser, are very funny.

Yet this is also a surprisingly sentimental book, beginning and ending with Benjamin listening wistfully to Shirley Collins’s song “Adieu to Old England”, which is not to its disadvantage. It is an autumnal novel, and a sad one: poignant about the passing of time, the wishing for what has vanished, the decades lost to obscure hatreds, misplaced loves and unsatisfactory marriages – and about what, washing up on the brink of old age, we’re left with and what we can or can’t make of it. That a river, or two, runs through it is no accident.

And in this context the national stuff just sort of bubbles up. The Midlands landscape of Benjamin’s childhood, a landscape at once familiar and remembered and transformed and imaginary, is the real middle England of the novel. And what is lost and gained goes far beyond the referendum in 2016. To quote that therapist again: “Something much more fundamental and personal was going on.”

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[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

Written a year ago by

Bearly Politics on Twitter

Yesterday's flood of comments and those intriguingly candid DMs about us “remoaners” who can't let go got me thinking and doing a bit of introspection on the late-night, empty tube on the way home. Why exactly am I personally still so angry about the Brexit omniclusterfuck?

Now, fair warning, this is my personal perspective, so may not apply universally, but I suspect that it may resonate just a little bit with one or two people.

The central and main reasons I’m still so infuriated have less to do with losing the actual Brexit vote and more with what has happened before and especially since we left the EU.

We were promised so many, many things during the leave campaign, and this list is merely representative and not fully inclusive.

What were these promises?

- Cheaper shoes.

- Cheaper food.

- We would have all the cards when it comes to negotiating trading arrangements.

- Control of our borders.

- Control of our laws.

- £350 million extra in the NHS.

- Shorter waiting times for treatment (that video that was made was particularly fucking galling, making the comparison of what the NHS looks like in the EU and out of the EU).

- An increase in our environmental standards.

- Houses popping up left, right, and centre like thistles in a shit patch.

- Freedom from restrictive EU regulations.

- Access to a cornucopia of Free Trade Agreements, with the US being the holy grail of these.

- The deal was oven ready.

- Sunlit. Fucking. Uplands.

These are some big promises to make, and when you listen to them and think they could be true, many of the above would be absolute vote winners! Yet, when the rubber hit the road, and we left the EU four years ago, not a single one of these grand promises came true and what we got instead was:

- Runaway inflation (hurried along by a government riddled with dangerous incompetence) making everything we need to live so much more dear.

- Net migration has increased to around 750,000.

- A flagship free trade agreement with the Pacific that’s going to add a negligible amount of additional trade.

- An NHS that is not only underfunded (yes it fucking is) but incorrectly funded as well.

- Social care that is basically non-existent, our environmental standards that have fallen so far that the government merely impotently shrugs at the fact that we have more turds in our rivers and waterways than actual living creatures.

- Watering down of Net-Zero targets.

- An absolutely dire housing situation that is currently being blamed on that favourite villain of this Conservative government, migrants.

- We aren’t diverging from EU regulations because they’re not actually bad regulations and we still desperately need access to EU Markets.

- Our free trade agreements have been slow in coming in and meaningless in their contribution to the overall economic health of the country.

- The deal is currently being dismantled and renegotiated to ensure the Union remains intact.

- Which sunlit fucking uplands?!

Now, the outcome so far itself has already irritated me beyond human comprehension, as I think it would anyone who has been paying any sort of attention to what were essentially the KPIs we were given for Brexit, but where my blood really, really starts boiling over into a state of silent rage is when you look at what happens when you raise any of these issues.

The barefaced, blatant, baffled lying that has been done around this (and I’m not going to pussyfoot around and call it anything but lying because that has been exactly what they’ve done, they’ve lied), the hypocrisy and the megawatt-generating gaslighting that happens is just astounding. When you raise the fact that the promises made have not been met, the following responses invariably follow:

- You’re just yet another “remoaner”.

- You’re unpatriotic.

- You don’t love your country.

- It will take generations to achieve benefits.

- This is not the Brexit we voted for.

- These things weren’t said at all.

- People knew what they voted for.

- It was only ever about sovereignty.

- It’s “remoaners” that have kiboshed the project

- You didn’t believe in it fucking hard enough like Brexit was a modern-day fucking Tinkerbell with seriously shady undertones.

- Businesses always knew there would be trade friction.

- It's the fault of foreign courts.

- It's the fault of the pandemic.

- Other countries are doing as badly.

- It's the migrants.

- It's the civil service.

- It's the opposition.

And if it’s not the above, then things that are actual disasters are being spun as “Brexit Fucking Benefits” with the Cabinet Office just yesterday selling the additional checks on goods coming in as protecting our fucking biodiversity instead of what it is, a damned trade barrier that we ourselves are having to erect as part of the "oven ready deal!"

I desperately, desperately, with all my heart, wish that once, just once, someone like Andrea Leadsom, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, Mark Francois or even the Labour Party would say “you know what, we were missold on this, and subsequently things have been completely fucked against the wall, and I’m very sorry for the people who have had to pay the price for the outright avarice and deceptive tactics to win the vote. We're sorry that this has been so badly mishandled and that you the public are the ones paying the price.”

Is that too much to ask? Instead of doubling down, is it too much to expect a bit of fucking honesty?!

Do I think that the EU is a paragon of perfection? Not at all, I think there are major reforms needed and it needs to do a serious bit of introspection about quite a few things. Do I think that’s a reason to leave? Absolutely not - if you want something to get better, you do so from the inside as part of the solution.

Do I think that Brexit could be made to work? With major adjustments, yes, absolutely. Do I think it can work if we keep trying to sell dinky champagne bottles as Brexit benefits and keep living in the self-delusional state we’re in at the moment? Not a snowball's chance in hell. Are there ways of fixing this fuckup we find ourselves in? Yes, but they would be very, very unpalatable to any Brexiteer.

So, where do we find ourselves now?

Knee-deep in a Brexit quagmire, mired in lies, and disillusionment. It's not just that the promises have been broken; it's the sheer audacity of those who made them, still strutting around, defending the indefensible. The reality? We've been sold a utopia and handed dystopia.

We're not just dealing with the consequences of a misguided decision; we're living in a state of perpetual denial, led by those too proud or too scared to admit they were wrong. It's like being on a sinking ship where the captain insists we're just stopping for ice.

In the end, we, the so-called "remoaners," aren’t just naysayers; we're the canaries in the coal mine, desperately chirping warnings in a tunnel that's fast running out of oxygen. Our anger isn’t about a lost vote; it's about a lost future, a vision of Britain that's being eroded day by day under the weight of its own delusions.

We need more than just damage control; we need a course correction, and we need it now. If we continue on this path, the sunlit uplands will remain nothing but a mirage on the Brexit horizon.

🐻

#BrexitBrokeBritain #BrexitDisaster #RealityCheckRequired

[owlservice]

Whoops!

[imspardagus]

In the BBC Question Time Audience

Brian Bilston, the undisputed Bard of Twitter, or X as we now have to call it (though the thought of it makes me cross), was having a sort out of some of his old titles. This one caught my eye:

She couldn’t recall how she’d got there

She wondered who’d got her the seat

She’d hoped for the Vicar of Dibley

Or something they’d always repeat

But here she was stuck in the back row

While down there, so smug and remote,

A crescent of conmen were crowing

It made her feel sick in the throat

She sat as they first blamed each other

Then blamed all the immigrants next

Then unions, remoaners and teachers

She found she was getting quite vexed

The man who was sitting beside her

Multi-chinned, piggy-eyed, putty skin

Put his hand in the air for attention

And the camera zoomed eagerly in

“It’s them soft, lefty judges,” he blurted,

“Betraying the English each day”

She thought that someone might oppose him

But Fiona just nodded away

On the panel the Labour stooge started

But Fiona Bruce just cut him off

And handed the question to Nigel

Who looked pleased as a pig in his trough

“We’re hearing the voice of the people,”

He smarmed to a wave of applause

“We’re sick of elites in this country

 And boat people hitting our shores.”

“We’re sick of kowtowing to Frenchies,”

Said the man with the Huguenot name,

“We beat all the Krauts two wars running,”

Like he’d been there, had skin in the game.

The man at her side bawled “Too right, mate”

“This is not what I fought Nazis for.

To let bloody towelheads and Gypos

Take jobs we won’t do any more.”

The Tory harrumphed his approval

Nige grinned like a cat with the cream

The Labour stooge looked at his papers

The Tufton Street twat sat and beamed

And this was the point that she panicked

And shaking she rose to declare

“I just want to say he’s not with me,

…  And I’m not with him, if you care.”

The silence that followed was heavy

The director yelled “Cut”. Bruce looked peeved  

They stopped the recording that instant

And somebody asked her to leave

As she walked to the bus she felt angry

The lies buzzed like flies in her head

She went back to her bedsit in Croydon

To watch Mrs Brown’s Boys instead.

Iain M Spardagus

August 2024

[morosestferret]

The Guardian: They’re openly saying it: Brexit has failed. But what comes next may be very dark indeed

[megamanofnumbers]

"Remoaner" sounds like a really good pornstar name.

Hold on. I want it now. Nobody take it.

So did you hear about Twitter exploding over your King Kong take in the Kauji vid? I haven't looked over there myself, but apparently they only decided to get made about the allegory you pointed out years ago... Now.

I haven't seen any explosion. I saw one person get four likes by dropping the blistering hot take of "leftists are the real racists for noticing when people in the 30s were being racist", then they @'d us for attention so I muted them. Anyone who uses the phrase "leftard" is not arguing in good faith and I don't consider their criticism useful.

[best-protest-signs]

Well, is it?

Follow @best-protest-signs for more.

[deborahdeshoftim5779]

An Angry and Disappointed Briton

Regardless of what you think about the European Union, I am angry and disappointed in my country today. Our Parliament set a law that mandated our departure from the European Union at 11pm on 29/03/2019. They have failed to deliver on this legal requirement. 

Our Prime Minister insists on ramming through a deal that has been thrice rejected by MP’s. Our MP’s have ruled out our crucial bargaining chip, leaving without a deal, despite the fact that the EU have been preparing for No Deal since December 2017 (and so have we!). 

Many of our MP’s have backed a Second referendum, despite insisting during the first that there would be none and that they would respect the Referendum result! 

The lies--let’s call them as they are-- are galling and truly demonstrate why so many Britons are angry with Westminster and why Leave won in the first place. Parliament does not speak for the people. On every crucial issue, they have ignored their constituents and, having learned nothing from the shock of 23/06/2016, continue to lead us for a ride. 

We are supposed to be a nation of laws and a democracy. Evidently we are not. Disappointing!

[aryas-zehral]

I mean I know there's a lot of depressed people in Scotland (including me) but I didnt realise it was supernatural in origin. I thought it was the dark and the rain and the cost of living crisis and maybe some bad genetics and those people south of the border that keep voting for things like Brexit and Tories.

[omgbriangeorge]

While not masking up much now I still plan to fly the flag. #remain #remoaner #borisout #toryscum https://www.instagram.com/p/CcpfGEPsRcm/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[anyoneknowwhatbrexitmeans]

“Of course, as we shall see, he and his fellow Brexiters do not blame that failure on the idea itself, but it’s the admission that counts. It offers grounds for modest celebration: now, at last, the contours of an emerging national consensus are visible, as remainers and leavers alike can join in agreement that this thing has not worked. And yet it comes at a price, one that also became darkly visible this week.”

[thesteveyates]

Other labels.

Who would be an anti vax-er today ?, or for that matter who would be a freedom lover , a free thinker and advocate of free speech or even a nazi, and far right protesting white supremacist ? : in some parts of the corporate driven groupthink of mass media those labels are interchangeable….and we should be very worried about labels. Right now there are many people out on the streets of many…

[pointless-letters]

‪REASONS WHY BRITAIN IS TOTALLY RUINED THESE DAYS, NUMBER 19,592: "Fictional characters not being patriotic enough to support Brexit." ‬

[jasonsimpsonart]

Celebratory #Souvlaki Just got my appointment for residency permit. 17 December. Have to treble check I’ve got all the right documentation #Remoaner #StayingEuropean #StayinginEurope #LockdownGreece #LockdownAthens #Greece #Athens #ExcitedBeyondWords (at Monastiraki Square) https://www.instagram.com/p/CIGDHroF5gg/?igshid=1dhedmmwfocpg

[modernsocialist]

Generation Wars - The Return of the Remainers

AKA: 'The Negation of Democracy by Demography' or 'The Geriatric Empire Strikes Back'

The right-wing press and anti-EU Tories have been bleating on about how Brexit is 'the will of the people' whilst ignoring the how tight the Referendum result was and giving no credit to the 48.5% of voters for Remain. They've labelled us 'Remoaners' when a vote that close is hardly the strong mandate they claim it is. Brexiteers have also ignored the fact that such huge constitutional changes in more democratic countries are organised properly, not in the rushed mess of David Cameron, requiring 60% or two-thirds of the vote to agree to such potentially dangerous actions.

But my point here is about the demography of the Brexit vote, for it is a well-known fact that Brexit increased in popularity among age groups as they got older, many believing that an unanchored Britain would become Great again and somehow get its Empire back. But statistical analysis of voting patterns and demographic trends by Prof. Revd. Adrian Low for IPSOS/Newsnight shows that 563,000 Leave voters had died by the time of signing Article 50 in March last year, which would have already halved their majority. (Coincidentally, about the same number of young people had turned 18yrs old with the corresponding right to vote. Assuming they all turned out, voting Remain, the Referendum would have been practically a draw. That is just theoretical, though.)

But back to the demographic trend of the Remain voters again. If Britain gets its interim leaving period, desired by Theresa May and Phillip Hammond, to leave over two years in March 2021, the number of Brexit voters will have been reduced by deaths to the extent that the number of those left who voted Leave in the Referendum will have become considerably outnumbered by those who had voted Remain in 2016. In other words, by the time Britain leaves the EU, the majority of the population, voters or not, would be in favour of remaining in the EU. The Tories know this, and even with a soft Remainer turned hard Brexiteer as their leader, there is no chance of a referendum on the final deal being offered to the British public as they know they would lose it to a Remain linked campaign.

And yet Parliament having won a say and a vote on the final deal, neither Commons or even the more independent Lords will try to do more than talk a lot about the deal, table amendments and score political points. Even after a farce of party politics masquerading as democracy took place, it would be a foregone conclusion that Parliament would assent to leaving the EU and even if it went down to the drama of a third vote in the Commons, the Bill would finally be approved and go through. This is because very few MPs would follow their consciences about remaining in the EU, in the fear of being labelled anti-democratic (with very few speaking up for the huge numbers of actual voters who expressed their desire to remain, never mind the proportion of politicians corresponding to that of the Referendum result). Any MP standing up to make the Remain argument would be barracked in the Commons by the huge number of hard-right Tories and outside the House by the same old anti-EU conservative press as cosmopolitan elitists who do not care about 'the Will of the People'; this despite the demographics clearly showing a move of 'the Will of the People' towards a voting majority wishing to Remain rather than Leave.

It's known that I've criticized Jeremy Corbyn for not providing any lead on Brexit but the Unions and Momentum should push for pro-EU candidates that come from as wide a background as possible, particularly taking level in the economic strata into account (i.e. working and lower-middle class). This new left-wing cadre would be better at trying to enthuse traditional Labour voters, while also being more new media savvy to reach the younger generations, which would help create a large and loud mandate for Labour to attempt to halt a Brexit that a majority now do not, nor in the near future will not, want, and in a way that would be undeniably democratic in manner. Labour should never have given in to anti-immigration racism, leaving it barely challenged in poorer Labour heartlands. The way Corbyn enthused voters gave him a chance to give a lead on this issue but was lost because of his long-term opposition to the EEC and EU on the grounds that they helped capitalism. He never saw the opportunity for Continental worker unity as part of a long-term project towards International worker unity. (This nonsense about Britain joining a 'Capitalist Club' in 1973 originated in the Kremlin as propaganda to keep Europe disunited. The parallels with the Referendum, Putin's desire for a Leave vote and fake news in the present are more than uncanny.) Yet now Labour's core vote that swung to UKIP temporarily has swung back as they slowly realise that leaving the EU has not brought the benefits promised. If the Referendum was ran again, would Boris Johnson travel round in a bus painted with the slogan, "Leave Now! It'll Only Cost Us £50Bn"? No, of course not.

But putting costs aside, as well as the fact that big capital also supports British membership of the EU for cheap labour and access to markets, there are socialist reasons for staying in the EU. Like some others of the European radical left, I've balanced the capitalist argument for staying in against the reason for having a larger EU, which, as I pointed out above would allow the uniting of a greater Europe-wide proletariat. A Britain staying in could and would have a say in attacking the bureaucracy as well as protecting and extending the rights of European workers. Britain has a large advanced proletariat in relation to the EU and the advantages to capital of remaining members could be outweighed by a radicalised workforce if only the Left recognised it. The EU cannot be simply dismissed as a 'Capitalist Club'. There are many opportunities in continued membership for the radical left along with the present protections for British workers that are in danger from a Tory Brexit. Let us fight to be European, even if it takes us as long as John Major's 'bastards'. Only if we're in the EU can we unite in a project to amass worker power.

[joelcoen]

if kier starmer had a backbone then labour wouldn’t have to rely on patriotic values to win back labour voters