The announcement of a ‘Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ in January 2022 is simultaneously both the most idiotic and the most desperate stunt Theresa May has concocted.
Yet it’s also depressingly revelatory because what is amusingly called the ‘reasoning’ behind the stunt exposes perfectly the poverty of thought, monomania, ruthlessness, and absence of imagination which characterise Theresa May.
Designed ‘to strengthen our precious union’, it will demonstrate and accentuate the opposite, a UK splitting apart constitutionally and socially with large chunks of the population, Muslim. Afro-Caribbean, Scottish and Irish in the north of Ireland not feeling in the slightest bit connected to May’s Little England, or least of all, its nineteenth century history, which she calls up by referring to the Victorian Great Exhibition of 1851.
Nevertheless her announcement perfectly illustrates what Brexit is really about. In an article on September 28 in ‘Project Syndicate’, Joschka Fischer, the former German foreign minister, puts his finger on it. As he points out, in day to day matters the EU is a single market and a customs union but fundamentally it is more than that. ‘At its core it is a political project based on a specific idea about the European system of states. This idea – not the economics of the matter – is what Brexit is really about.’ The slim majority of mainly English people who voted Leave, either poorly educated or ageing, nostalgic voters, or both, voted to restore full political sovereignty. ‘Take back control’ was the powerful slogan that seduced them.
They voted not for economic benefit, or with any objective idea of Britain’s present position, but to restore their deluded notion of Britain as a global power in the nineteenth century. They opted for the nineteenth over the twenty-first century. In this century Britain is a medium-sized European state which will never have a chance of becoming a global power again. As Fischer says, Britain’s best chance of wielding power is as a member of the EU. Going it alone is not on despite all the insane talk of trade deals with the US, India and China.
Essentially what Theresa May is inviting people to celebrate in 2022 is Britain’s formal retirement from the world stage. Harking back to celebrate Britain’s ‘creativity and innovation’ means looking backwards. Then again, that’s the direction May and her party are facing. She is intent in taking the north backwards with her despite the emphatic vote here in 2016 to reject the crazy misinformation of the Leavers.
The danger is that she really will drag us back with this idiotic plan. Nationalists will of course boycott the whole shebang. Ominously, by 2022 nationalists will be the majority here. In a recent academic book, ‘The Contested Identities of Ulster’, which you won’t have read because it costs a hundred quid, the distinguished Professor John Coakley predicts a Catholic majority in the 2021 census. Theresa May is on course to accelerate that into a nationalist majority who will bitterly reject the nonsense she is advocating and strongly repudiate her flawed opportunistic concept of a nation. How this will play out on the streets is another matter but this daft £120 million extravaganza contains a lot of volatile ingredients not least the denial of the existence of the new majority in the north.
Perhaps most disgraceful is her ulterior motive in the timing of the announcement. In her speech today at the Conservative party conference Theresa May will signal she intends to hang on as prime minister. No better way to express her determination to do so than to announce a hare-brained plan for January 2022. Even worse, it’s four months before the next scheduled general election which she obviously intends will follow a carnival of xenophobia which she will kick off in January.
This xenophobic carnival, contrary to what she claims to believe, will increase division in her own country – England – when thousands who do not subscribe to her antediluvian ideas about Britain work to sabotage the planned festival. After all, if you’re Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Scottish, Irish or one of many others in ethnically diverse Britain, there’s nothing for you in looking back to 1951 much less 1851 when Britannia Waived The Rules.
