Brexit, the plight of the Remainers

Isn’t it often the way that one ends up accumulating too much to say and so keeps putting off saying it, as if there will come a moment when everything will collapse into sensible paragraphs and write itself.

I find myself continually confronted by some very clear facts but no sense that they can be conveyed as such to anyone who can make a difference.

For example it is a self-evident fact that immigration always benefits the receiving country. Equally it is clear from the stats of the Brexit referendum that there is an inversely proportionate relationship between exposure to immigrants and voting Brexit. In my recent talks about politics from a psychoanalytic point of view, I’ve referred to my colleague, Fakhry David’s theory about the internal racist to address the ease with which unscrupulous politicians were able to arouse a deep and powerful ‘fear of strangers’ response in an electorate already anxious, threatened and unheard.

We all know that the attack on Europe was a displacement from the real sources of massive inequality, the establishment and the obscenely wealthy. We know, as well, that the appeal to a mythical past in which the UK stood alone successfully is another example of how to arouse an infantile response in which certainty substitutes for thinking. Omnipotence is infantile; relating in a mutually supportive way is grown up. Most UK trade is carried out with Europe and there simply cannot be a cheaper way of doing that than a tariff-free market in which goods and services can move without restriction.

We all know all of this, so how come we remain in this mess and how come we fear a new referendum and how come we have no faith that those who were elected to represent us will act to stop us leaving the EU, when everything this staggeringly incompetent government has done only reveals, on a daily basis, how dangerous it will be to be outside Europe?

To answer the, ‘why can’t politicians act like grown ups?’ question first. It is all about unconscious beliefs. Unconscious beliefs are ideas that are held in a fixed way deep in our unconscious minds; the conscious representation of these ideas is simply that they are facts. For the fundamentalist, the idea of a god is a fact, not questionable, for the ordinary religious person, god is recognised as a belief (i.e. NOT a fact, just something hoped for that can/must be tested before it can be taken to be true). I don’t know exactly what Cameron’s unconscious belief was but it had something to do with a catastrophe if the site of certainty was to be challenged. Essentially the extreme right of the Conservative Party who hate Europe and believe Britain can still survive on its own (and probably re-establish its Empire over Johnny foreigner) was this site of certainty. Instead of dealing with his divided party in a courageous act of leadership, he ran away and handed to job to the electorate. This attitude continues in his successor and will lead to further disaster.

On the other side of the political spectrum? Well, there’s the thing, there isn’t another side of the spectrum. In a way, May has been much more politically pragmatic than Corbyn; she was a remainer who saw that the role for the conservative party was to get behind Brexit and make a fist of it. This left 48% of the country looking for representation. Instead they got another politician mired in unconscious beliefs that belong to the 1920s. This time a view of capitalism and size (it’s better for the workers to be in a smaller community, where they have more chance to stand against the exploiters), totally missing the point that globalism is a fact (i.e. the ‘fat cats’ all have a global presence) and that any chance to fight this will be best organised by forming political alliances not isolating yourself. So nobody other than the LibDems represent the remainers and they are unelectable because of another phenomenon, long understood by the psychoanalytic study of group dynamics, which is the difficulty of extracting yourself from an externally imposed role, particularly one of scapegoat. The other chance would be the Labour MPs deciding that their role is to represent the remainers. But here is another of those unconscious beliefs; similar to the one that trapped Cameron and still traps May, namely that challenging a powerful element in the group with the argument that they are out of touch with reality, will lead to a catastrophe. In both cases the catastrophe in question being the disintegration of their group.

Unless someone amongst the politicians is prepared to risk this myth of disintegration of the home group and show that the Emperor/Brexit has no clothes, we remainers are forced to consider another referendum. But herein lies another danger. This one best described by one of my favourite psychological theories, Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance Theory. Amongst the other things that arise from this theory (which is essentially that human beings are centrally motivated to avoid the emotional dissonance that arises from being confronted with two opposing psychological truths), is that, if I make a stupid decision for no good reason other than that I rather enjoyed doing it, I am extremely unlikely to admit it was stupid, however many facts are assembled in front of me that make it clear. In other words it is no surprise that those who voted Brexit will still vote Brexit, “I don’t care if I lose my job and am made homeless by the loss of work resulting from Brexit, I’m not going to let any more immigrants in, I’m not going to give up my sovereignty etc.”

For god’s sake, please will a viable, votable politician provide a centre around which a proper opposition to this madness can evolve.