Nick Cohen

I don’t believe in turning George Orwell’s writing into Holy Scripture – he would have hated the reverence as much as anything else. But if the Brexit right is going to crow and quote his dislike of the communist-influenced left intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s it should read the rest of his work first.  Orwell believed in a united socialist Europe. ‘Democratic Socialism must be made to work throughout some large area,' he wrote just after the Second World War. 'But the only area in which it could conceivably be made to work, in any near future, is Western Europe’. If you can forget his belief in a post-war socialism that has gone, Orwell’s arguments for European unity stand up well.

From Venezuela to Zimbabwe, the noise that defines failing states is the wail. It’s not our fault, their leaders cry. We are the victims of a foreign conspiracy, fifth columnists and saboteurs. The most obvious and least discussed consequence of last night’s capitulation by the British Prime Minister to the right of her party is that the Tories are building a conspiracy theory of their own, as they prepare to whine and blame everyone but themselves for the crisis they have brought on Britain. If it is teaching us nothing else, Brexit has at least shown us that 'taking back control' never means taking on responsibility.

Britain moved a step close to Weimar yesterday when the Prime Minister used the threat of terrorism to get her way. Being a conservative woman of the upper-middle class, Theresa May did not precisely mimic the cries of ‘there will be blood’ that come from the right’s more deranged corners. You don’t talk like that if you want to get on in Thames Valley society. Rather the Prime Minister issued her warning in the careful language of a bureaucrat. ‘There has not yet been enough recognition of the way that a second referendum could damage social cohesion by undermining faith in our democracy,’ she said. You would have missed her intent behind this seemingly bland statement unless you had been paying attention to the noise that surrounds her.

Even though Jeremy Corbyn and the men and women who support him are often shabby and occasionally reactionary figures, the rarest criticism you hear of them is criticism from the left. Political commentary in Britain runs like water through pipes. Conventional opinion holds that if you are left wing, you support the Labour leadership, and if you are not, you don’t. Even though there is an essential left case to be made against the degeneration of Labour into conspiracy theory and personality cults, authors who make it are ignored because they do not fit into the familiar pattern. More than any formal censorship, this control of thinking is the most effective way of shutting out new arguments.

Hungary is the Venezuela of the Western right. Just as radical leftists revealed the emptiness of their concern for the powerless by applauding as Chavez and Maduro’s gang of thieves reduced the poor to starvation, so conservatives’ admiration for Viktor Orbán shows the ephemerality of right-wing 'civilisation'. Conservatives never fail to miss an opportunity to speak out against assaults on what one assumes are their basic principles when the assaults are committed by their own side. The rule of law? Orbán has stuffed the judiciary with his appointees for years, and is now establishing a system of courts that exempt his government from independent judicial review. The free market?

It is now standard on the right to say that the establishment is sabotaging Brexit. I could pick one of half a dozen writers for this magazine, who wallow in the language of victimhood as luxuriantly as any of the alleged snowflakes they so unselfconsciously denounce. The inevitable failure to transfer the impossible demands of the Brexit campaign into the politics of the possible is producing vicious stab-in-the-back myths. Nowhere more so than from the lips of the Conservative MP Maria Caulfield who declared yesterday: https://twitter.com/mariacaulfield/status/1070091419086450688?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw Note how artfully she plays the innocent who came to Westminster with high ideals, like a modern Candide, only to see them crushed by the machinations of the ruling class.

The British are like patients with an incurable illness. Thinking and worrying can do no good, but those who understand Britain’s sickness can think of nothing else. Rationally, we understand there is nothing we can do about Brexit until and unless the balance of forces shifts in Westminster. No one knows what will happen next. No one can say when the European question will be settled, and we will be free to to get on with our lives as best we can. All options have been discussed to the point of exhaustion and beyond. But like patients who cannot shut their illness from their minds, we can’t help ourselves. We talk in circles in arguments without end. Brexit was meant to bring back control, but has left us impotent and at the mercy of impostors promising miracle cures.

A year ago, campaigners for a ‘people’s vote’ seemed an eccentric bunch of no hopers and bad losers. Mocked as ‘remoaners’, their arguments barely covered by the media, history had left them behind. As the leave campaigns’ central claim that we could have the benefits of EU membership while leaving the EU is revealed for the absurdity it always was, the ‘people’s vote’ has gathered mass support and moved from the fringes to the mainstream with heartening speed. One mark of the campaign’s success is that even its critics acknowledge that a ‘peoples vote’ is a viable solution to the constitutional, economic and diplomatic crisis that engulfs us.

The conventional wisdom that we live in echo chambers always seemed too convenient an explanation of political polarisation to be true. Believers could convince themselves that their causes lost, not because they were faulty or fantastical or outright wicked, but because their opponents had brainwashed a majority of the electorate to reject them. For all the credence given to it, echo-chamber theory is little more than an update of Noam Chomsky’s 'propaganda model'  in which the media allegedly manipulates the populace into agreeing with agendas that are against its interest. This is the perfect excuse for failure: Scooby-Doo sociology that allows the defeated to cry, 'and I would have gotten away with it if wasn’t for you meddling brainwashers.

The alliance between the white far left and the Islamist right is a dirty secret in plain sight. Few can bear to look at it. None of the books and documentaries on Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour party asked, even in passing, how people who professed to be socialists and feminists, found themselves promoting theocrats and misogynists. I have no doubt that ‘serious’ scholars will be as negligent when they come to write their accounts. In supposedly stable Britain, there is a psychological aversion to admitting that the dark corners of modern history can be the best place to find the roots of current crises.

You rarely come across a character in modern literature like Jimmy Knight. He’s a racist, but that’s not what makes him a novelty act. racists, after all, are deplored everywhere in the culture industry, from Hollywood to Pinewood Studios. Of this racist, however, his ex-wife says: ‘I wouldn’t trust him if it was anything to do with Jews. He doesn't like them. Israel is the root of all evil, according to Jimmy. Zionism: I got sick of the bloody sound of the word.’ Knight is also a misogynist, a type which is once again a familiar figure in contemporary fiction. But when his girlfriend cries out after he hits her, he replies by attacking her privilege with the language of the left: 'Oh fuck off, that didn’t hurt!

Cold calculation suggests there won’t be a second referendum. It could destroy both the Tory and Labour parties, and in any case, we appear to be heading for a classic EU fudge that will postpone hard choices. But as all predictions in 2018 are likely to be false, and the Tory right appears determined to provoke a crisis, it’s worth understanding why the People’s Vote campaign thinks that next time it will be different. They will be the insurgents and the Brexiters will be defending the status quo. Running against a failed establishment has always been a good tactic, but never more so than in the 2010s. Remain campaigners find in focus groups that the double standards of the Brexit elite have 'cut through,' as the marketing departments say.

The far left is preparing the ground for its coming purge of the Labour party by burning down every rational objection that stands in its way. To take the most rational objection to its plans, consider the case of a Labour MP who breaks with Jeremy Corbyn on Brexit or racism. He or she is doing nothing more than following the example of Jeremy Corbyn, who broke with the Labour whip 428 times during his decades as a backbencher. A left that reserves a special place in its demonology for ‘McCarthyism’ – the persecution of individuals for their political beliefs – should have no difficulty with Corbyn’s opponents following their consciences too. What’s sauce for the old goose.