Britain is not at war with itself – but Brexit is one hell of a messy divorce

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/27/brexit-leavers-remainers-war-battle-language-divorce

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Your relationship is in crisis, so you go to Relate. You both explain, between sobs, what you think is happening. You both talk about want, need, deep disappointment and betrayal. There is much nodding from the counsellor. It soon becomes clear your needs are incompatible, that you cannot even stand to be in the same room as each other, but you cannot split up because you need to live in the same house. And somehow you must bring up the next generation without hate.

Once we used divorce as a metaphor for our break with Europe. Now the messier split is within the country itself. And while divorce may be a poor comparison, it is still better than the one that fills our political discourse, which is war. In the macho pronouncements of the left and right there is awful bombast, talk of coups, a continual throwback to past victories, endless militaristic pretence, bellicose rhetoric. Calm down, dears, I want to say to a George Galloway or a Mark Francois. The further any politician has been from active service the more they talk in this way. It’s sickening. And weapons of mass delusion abound. Remain did not win the EU elections, Farage consolidated the leave vote. Both main parties are in tatters and the deadline looms. We may get a hard Brexiter PM, while Corbyn is bullied into dithering.

Meanwhile, we leavers and remainers live in the same house, messily unseparated. Each side promises that they will no longer have to inhabit the same space, that someone can win, and that is appealing. Going it alone. The fantasy of: we don’t need Europe and we don’t need pathetic latte-drinkers, or we don’t need stupid leavers who talk of sovereignty but are all racists, yada yada yada. We don’t need Scotland. Or Wales and Ireland (wherever that is). The border can apparently be “invisible”, which does make me wonder why the British army spent so many years there. But the message I get is, who cares? Half the country doesn’t need the other half. We are that hard.

This conflict, which may be rooted in economics, is played out culturally and psychologically as identity. Brexit is identity politics for those who don’t believe in such a thing. Nonetheless, these identities will continue, so there are no winners. There are conflicts about values. Words such as compromise, empathy, conciliation seem inappropriate in a battlefield. We could, though, turn it down a notch – something our adversarial politics never wants to do.

A conciliatory or more cooperative style would mean give and take, understanding the demands of others and being able to yield to some of them

Leave won because of its simplistic message. Remain responded by shouting that all leavers are idiots. I always felt torn. I voted remain, but often felt pretty Brexity because of class, because I believe in the most direct democracy possible and because I was dismayed to see the entire political and cultural establishment speak with one voice that clearly refused to understand that half the country already felt unlistened to. It chose not to understand because it just didn’t need to.

Little has changed in three years. No one has “reached out”, or tried persuasion. The tectonic plates around Scottish, Welsh and English nationalism shift as the political class disintegrates. The basics of conflict resolution – the building of consensus and collaboration – seem completely untenable because everything around Brexit is aggressive and intimidatory and empathy is for losers. A conciliatory or more cooperative style would mean give and take, understanding the demands of others and being able to yield to some of them. To see shared goals, to see the self in the other, to not lose face, to shore up ego while giving way on some demands, to hold what we have in common dear – this can’t work if we are in a situation of mutually assured destruction, otherwise known as the two-party system.

So here we are, sharing this land, not equitably but inevitably. Brexit is a manifestion of many issues, few of which will be solved by its enactment. We will still be living in the same house.

So tone it down. This is not a clash of civilisations. Conflict can be de-escalated by turning down the volume. There are bigger things. Yes, really. The state of permanent anger on both sides is a strange, but impotent arousal, involving momentary illusions of power and autonomy. We cannot, in reality, separate from those who disagree with us. However angry we feel, we live in the same house.