Fantasy Pasts and Possible Futures

Here in liberal-ish West Surrey there is little Brexit nastiness beyond the sense of disorientation and helplessness endemic in the air. Mind you, many of my friends think they're safe from it in London, and this is not the case. Just after the Referendum S.D. heard two elderly souls at a Pimlico bus stop talking about how great it would be when there was £350M a week more to spend on the NHS, 'and then' (said the man conspiratorially), 'then we can send all the darkies back'. ('Because that's where all the darkies come from, Romania' commented Ms Formerly Aldgate at the time). Another friend was in an East End café on the day Britain was originally supposed to have left the EU, and after she returned from the counter with her coffee, which she had no option but to ask for in Italian-accented English, she was treated to a loud conversation between the man who served her and another customer about how there would be a civil war unless 'all the foreigners' were made to leave. But don't imagine it's just the non-white, non-native residents of these islands who aren't wanted in some areas of it. The BBC the other day spoke to locals in Chatham (where I used to live) who suggested that Scotland should be independent and anyone who voted Remain should be deported there. 'England for the English!' - as though no English person could take a different view. So, in some people's eyes, I have no place in the country I and my ancestors, stretching at least five long centuries back, have called our home.

Picking over the ruins of this horrible landscape would probably bore you as much as me, though I will say it's rich indeed that a Prime Minister who chose to divide her people into 'citizens of somewhere' and 'nowhere' now, at this late and dire hour, wants to bleat about togetherness and union. There are so many other ways this could have been done.

Remainers have their fantasies, of course. The Ode to Joy stirs the imagination with thoughts of liberty and international solidarity: 'Alles menschen verden bruder', indeed. Yet in practice the European Union is a flawed organisation of flawed beings, corrupt and remote and - if you're Greek - politically brutal, in ways that its ideals just throw into ironic relief. But at least this is a noble fantasy, and it's noble fantasies that drive human societies forward, provided you're aware of the distance between what you desire and what currently exists.

Backward-looking fantasies are different. 'The EU always cave in at the last minute', 'these will be the easiest negotiations in history', 'all our existing trade deals will roll over', 'other countries are lining up to do business with us' - all these falsehoods, whether deliberate or simply delusional, have at their heart a misconception of Britain's place in the world, and behind that, I increasingly find listening and observing, is World War Two. It's the constant reference point to which people locked in this dream return. 'We'll be all right,' said the man in the club in Chatham to the BBC, 'we managed in the War'. We are going to find that the world is a harder and colder place than we imagined, and that most of the rest of it doesn't care what happened seventy years ago, and increasingly treats with impatience and contempt Britain's insistence that Winston Churchill bought us a kind of eternal free pass to everything, when it thinks about it at all.

If there is anything positive to look forward to from this dreadful time, it's the death of fantasy. But I am not sure how we get from here to there, or what scars may need to be torn open before we do.