Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Brexit is a symptom of a deep-seated disease in British society

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy

Patrick Murphy is an Irish News columnist and former director of Belfast Institute for Further and Higher Education.

 British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives for an EU summit in Belgium on December 14 2018. Picture by Alastair Grant, AP
 British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives for an EU summit in Belgium on December 14 2018. Picture by Alastair Grant, AP  British Prime Minister Theresa May arrives for an EU summit in Belgium on December 14 2018. Picture by Alastair Grant, AP

Brexit is not the real problem in Britain, it is just a symptom of a more deep-seated British disease. A state which has invaded all but 22 countries in the world and once ruled 60 colonies is now self-destructing internally, a process which many attribute to Brexit.

But Brexit has merely triggered hidden illnesses in British society. The referendum result exposed three significant fractures in modern Britain: public mistrust of politics and politicians, huge social and economic inequality and, most interestingly, confusion over what it means to be British.

These divisions had previously remained hidden, papered over by the myth of the monarchy, a classless loyalty to a disappeared empire, the idea that the Dunkirk spirit compensated for deprivation and a belief that social inequality could be cured by endless cups of tea. Brexit laid bare conflicting interests on class, culture and identity, which fuelled the current political chaos.

Welcome to the end-game of the British empire, as the motherland finally implodes to the bemusement of the quarter of the world's population which was once ruled from London.

Like most modern political diseases, it all began with Mrs Thatcher. Her primary enemy was the welfare state, which she attacked with an enthusiasm later reflected in her destruction of mining and manufacturing across northern Britain. The solution to the lost jobs was that the unemployed should get on their bikes.

In 1984, Thatcher supported the brutal attack by mounted police on protesting miners at Orgreave, South Yorkshire. Five years later, that same police force's failings led to the unlawful killing of 96 men, women and children at a football match at Hillsborough stadium. The Sun newspaper led the police campaign to discredit the dead and it was not until April 2016 that the truth of the police's role emerged.

Eight weeks later, two thirds of those voting in South Yorkshire opposed the government by voting for Brexit. It was pay-back time.

While Irish nationalists ridicule what they call the pro-Brexit little Englander mentality, these were just people rebelling against injustice, poverty and unemployment. In economic adversity, the English rebelled against their government. The Irish emigrated.

Thatcher's political successor was Tony Blair, close friend of Sun-owner, Rupert Murdoch. Blair illegally invaded Iraq, misled the public about the war and misled the Labour party into becoming conservative. Public confidence in politicians collapsed and then sank lower with the MPs expenses scandal.

Three years after Blair left, Britain had its first coalition government since 1945, because all parties were now Thatcherite. Following the economic collapse in 2008, nobody defended the dispossessed and the welfare state was attacked again.

£16 billion has been cut from local government in the past eight years, slashing services to the elderly, children, education, libraries and policing. While one in every 200 people in Britain is now homeless, an estimated £133 billion of foreign money, much of it gained illegally, is inflating house prices. Today there are 14 million people in poverty in Britain, including 4.5 million children.

Brexit did not cause those problems. It just created an opportunity to air the grievances they created.

This economic inequality fuelled Scottish and Welsh nationalism, which left England without its own parliament and an indignant sense of constitutional unfairness reflected in right-wing nationalism. By 2016, people in England were three times more likely to identify as English rather than British, compared to 2011. Those identifying as English were more likely to vote for a hard Brexit.

Unlike Irish nationalism's core values of victimhood, angst and death, English nationalism is reflected in football fans dressing up as 11th century Crusaders, who went off to fight the Muslims, even though they were minding their own business 2000 miles away.

George Orwell recognised this by writing that the English share "an unconscious patriotism and an inability to think logically". It is reflected in a society where although only 14 per cent identify as Church of England, it is the officially recognised religion, whose leader is also the monarch. Brexit also exposed conflicting attitudes to that historical romanticism.

Today Britain's two main political parties are deeply divided on the structure, content and culture of modern British society. Although these divisions are infused into their endless arguments over Brexit, they fail to recognise that the UK is just a mini-EU. Both systems are based on unnecessary political union between nations and both operate economic austerity to protect the privileged and punish the poor.

Brexit is not the problem in Britain, so whatever the final Brexit deal, Britain will remain an increasingly polarised and unequal society. Its real problem is that nobody is demanding a referendum to tackle that one.