Britain’s last crusade against an abstract noun – the so-called war on terror – has ended in triumph in Afghanistan. So it is now time to pour the troops into another set of hostilities against a concept: the war on geography. It is showing every sign of being just as successful.
Brexit has always been a revolt against the tyranny of place. It is a way of believing that Britain could weigh anchor and float off from its humiliating position on the edge of the European continent into an imaginary space, the Anglosphere.
The first campaign in the war on geography was fought on the Irish Border. In the first flush of triumph in 2016, the physical fact that Britain, after Brexit, would have a land frontier with the European Union that also happens to be a zone of historic conflict was driven from the field of consciousness.
The more cruelly reality intruded, the more expansive the Brexit fantasy would become. The balloon would not burst – rather, the string holding it would break and it would float free of any contact with Earth
But it couldn’t be avoided forever, and the Brexiteers eventually capitulated. The complete failure of that assault on topographic truth ought to have been a rude awakening from Brexit dreams.
Fintan O’Toole: Ireland makes a fetish of corporation tax because it is too scared to be normal
Fintan O’Toole: Fine Gael’s virtuous self-image is at odds with reality
Fintan O’Toole: Nationalists must have an honest conversation with themselves on a United Ireland
Fintan O’Toole: Government cannot walk and chew gum at same time
The tedium of all that slow wading through backstops and protocols should have been a warning that, in politics and economics as well as in the housing market, the three most important things are location, location, location.
The UK had to be reminded that a part of its territory is located in a difficult vicinity. But this experience did little to sober up the Brexiteers – largely because, for all their unionist rhetoric, Northern Ireland does not matter to most of them.
It was, in Boris Johnson’s angry description in 2018, an annoying appendage: “It’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way.”
So, defeat in the Battle of the Border did not douse the zeal of the armchair generals for their wider war on geography. They maintained their belief that who you are trumps where you are, that the assertion of identity can make the facts of your physical position on the globe irrelevant.
Two things were always going to happen to this fantasy. One is that it would smash at high speed into the stone wall of actuality. That is what has been happening in recent weeks as the costs of deliberately creating trade barriers between yourself and your neighbours begin to come home.
The other certainty, though, was that the more cruelly reality intruded, the more expansive the Brexit fantasy would become. The balloon would not burst – rather, the string holding it would break, and it would float free of any contact with Earth.
Irony
This inverse relationship between what happens and how the Brexit believers respond to it is rooted in the way the whole project has avoided ever taking itself quite seriously. It has always been wrapped in so many layers of irony and camp performativity that the difference between serious propositions and playful exaggerations cannot be reliably discerned.
Take a small example: the self-celebratory dinner held last week at London's Carlton Club Club by the 28 so-called Spartans – the Brexit ultras who brought down Theresa May and forced through an extreme version of the UK's departure from the EU.
According to the Sunday Times, the dinner began with the saying of grace by one of their number, Sir Bernard Jenkin, who "urged his fellow hardliners to pray for forgiveness and enlightenment for the Remainers who had tried to thwart Brexit".
Is this funny or serious or completely bonkers or satirically self-aware? All and none of the above. It is perfectly congruent with the tone of the whole enterprise, the weird combination of fanaticism and knowingness in which every claim comes with its own set of inverted commas.
This surely extends to the joint article in Monday's Irish Times by two more hardline Brexiteers, Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, and Jim Allister, leader of the Traditional Unionist Voice.
Even if you can forget that both vigorously opposed the Belfast Agreement, you have to deal with their insistence that the Northern Ireland protocol is unconscionable because “a central pillar of the agreement is that ‘it would be wrong to make ANY [sic] change in the status of Northern Ireland, save with the consent of the majority of its people’.”
Again, it is impossible to pin down the tone here. Do they really think that the Brexit they helped to push through had the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland? Do they truly expect that they can now be taken seriously as guardians of the peace process when they embraced a project that was bound to shake it to the core?
Twilight zone
Of course they don’t – they’re not stupid and they surely don’t think their readers are stupid either. But this is what Brexit has done to political language. It has created a twilight zone in which words are entirely unmoored from reality and the tongue that is saying consequential things can simultaneously be firmly in the cheek.
When everything is tinged with this self-conscious absurdity, nothing that happens can be entirely real. And hence the war on geography is leading simultaneously to a disastrous rout and to the opening of a new front.
On the one hand, the tyranny of place is asserting itself in the most basic ways: the collapse of supply chains and the chronic absence of the HGV drivers who move goods between those most real of locations – Point A and Point B.
Yet, even as this chaos is unfolding, we have the British government mooting the possibility that their island can drive itself all the way across the Atlantic and join the United States, Canada and Mexico in their trade bloc, the USMCA.
Never mind that this would mean accepting rules the UK has had no part in making – the very reason why it refused to stay in the EU’s single market after Brexit. Or that the UK has embraced its own Groucho Marxism – it does not want to be a part of any club that will accept it as a member. Or that, if Britain did join another trade bloc, Northern Ireland, still effectively in the single market, would be even further differentiated from it.
Beyond even these absurdities, there is this dream of desirable displacement, the notion that a country can detach itself from its neighbours and pick new ones.
The problem with declaring war on geography is that the enemy has all the big battalions on its side: the history of trade, the practicalities of moving perishable goods, the integration of supply chains, Britain’s long-established inability to feed itself from its own farms.
But it is far too soon to start hoping that the concrete evidence of the futility of this crusade will force a profound rethink. After Britain’s voyage across the Atlantic in search of a nicer neighbourhood proves fruitless, there are always other oceans to try: the Pacific, the Indian, the Antarctic, the Sea of Tranquillity on the Moon.