When praise of Brexit becomes idolatry
The Israelites fooled themselves with a Golden Calf, writes George Pitcher, and it's much the same when Little Englanders claim our vaccine success is down to Brexit
When the Israelites followed Moses out of Egypt – Egyxit as it was not known in those days – their hopes for a Promised Land were dashed for some 40 years out in the wilderness.
During that time, they turned from their one, true God to other pagan deities to save them, notably the Golden Calf that they cobbled together from their jewellery and other trinkets. The penalties were high: Only the tribe of Levi resisted the idolatry and so escaped the massacre that Moses ordered on his return from Mount Sinai with the 10 commandments on how to live the itinerant life.
Something similar has happened with the new British political tribes since we were led out of the European Union at the start of this year. Those who believed we were bound for a Promised Land flowing with milk and honey have turned their religion with desperate fervour to something altogether more idolatrous, in the sense that they are now worshipping things that are patently untrue.
Here in the deepest politically blue territory of Sussex, as we return to socialising at the pub, I hear some version of the following: Since we left the EU on 31st January, the pound is trading significantly higher against the euro and the dollar; the FTSE 100 index has rocketed; we have all but defeated Covid through a world-beating vaccination programme and the Bank of England has upgraded our economic growth forecasts.
All this is ascribed in some way to “being in charge of our own destiny” and that consequently we’re already experiencing the benefits of Brexit. But it’s just not true – whatever the truth of the eventual benefits to be accrued from leaving the EU, this isn’t it. It’s a Golden Calf.
A rising pound means cheaper imports, but hobbles our exporters – not of itself a bad thing, but just to say that there are two sides to that strong-pound coin. The stock-market “boom” is a corrective recovery from collapsed pandemic levels and, anyway, its precipitous falls over more recent days are indicative of the kind of volatility to come.
Likewise, growth prospects are from such bargain-basement levels that any further falls would have taken us into the kind of economic wilderness in which we ate our own pets.
Greatest canard
But the greatest canard of the moment is the one voiced so readily by health secretary Matt Hancock, that the UK’s fast and efficient vaccine programme is a consequence of Brexit. Even the Institute for Government – proudly non-partisan though hardly a hotbed for passionate leftie remainers – finds that “none of these successes can be chalked up to Brexit”:
Any EU member state could have used the same provision of the legislation to approve the vaccine. They decided not to for political and technical reasons, not legal ones.
So if Brexit was the Leavers’ one true god, then the vaccine is their Golden Calf. This would not matter much beyond the saloon bars of Little England were it not for the toxicity that idolatrous nationalism carries with it. Because the idea of a Promised Land walks hand in hand through the political wilderness with the creed of a chosen people.
We see that in the Hebrew Bible’s account of how, when the Israelites crossed the Jordan into their appointed homeland, they put the men, women and children of indigenous tribes to the sword. More recently, we see it in the way the modern United States has imposed its political will on the world.
Outright war
And we continue to reap the harvest of that psychology in the middle-east today. Palestinians’ long-standing territorial grievance and the West’s support for Israel’s right to defend its homeland again means that the region teeters on the edge of outright war in Gaza.
Meanwhile, unlike the ancient Israelites, the British are not returning from exile, but have chosen to exile themselves. But the psychology of a Promised Land to which they’re entitled is much the same, as articulated in the “I just want my country back” panel-show trope.
Whether defending a homeland from displaced Palestinian insurgents or annexing it from imaginary foreign governance, the instinct is the same. To paraphrase Kris Kristofferson, sovereignty is just another word for tribal and cultural warfare.
What Janis Joplin (and many others) actually sang was that freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And that’s both as true and inaccurate of the psychology of populist nationalism as it is of early Seventies hippy culture wars.
What the Hamas rocket-launcher, the Israeli rubber-bullet discharger and the woman in the Question Time audience who wants her country back all have in common is that they believe that the only way to protect their own territory is to attack the freedom of others (in the last case it was freedom of movement in the EU).
But that is not so. While it would be wrong to categorise everyone who voted for Brexit as a Little Englander, it’s a reasonable supposition that every Little Englander voted Brexit. The awful irony for them is that they may get more than they demanded, if Brexit ultimately leads to a break-up of the British union. And where will their sacred sovereignty reside then?
Just like any other tribe that has worshipped a Golden Calf and longed for a mythical Promised Land, they should perhaps have been more careful what they wished for.
George Pitcher is a visiting fellow at the LSE and an Anglican priest