For neither the first nor I suspect the last time since Brexit my thoughts have in recent days been borne back to The Great Gatsby. Specifically, that moment when F Scott Fitzgerald writes: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
Well, the Brexiteers — Boris and Michael and Liam and David and Nigel and the rest of them — are careless people too. They like smashing things as well. Yesterday Daniel Hannan, the MEP sometimes considered the leader of Brexit’s intellectual wing, suggested that “the Good Friday agreement has failed”. This is about more than just the latest impasse in the saga of how best to restore devolved rule to the province; it’s also a question of the Good Friday agreement getting in the way of Brexit.
Now it is true that the Belfast agreement has, as Mr Hannan noted, been exalted to something near sacred status. Peace, albeit a qualified peace, came at a price. What passed for the centre of Northern Irish politics was hollowed out; the ensuing space was filled by the extremes. The SDLP and Ulster Unionist parties were the highest-profile political casualties of the process. Peace was revolutionary, you see, and the revolution devoured its parents.
A Sinn Féin-Democratic Unionist Party duopoly was not quite what the founders of the peace process had in mind. It is entirely reasonable to think this sometimes unseemly double act vastly preferable to some of the available alternatives while still maintaining it is a sub-optimal outcome. Trust has remained elusive and will continue to do so, not least since an atmosphere of mistrust bakes in the electoral supremacy enjoyed by the DUP and Sinn Féin in their respective communities.
Nevertheless, the manner in which Brexiteers casually dismiss the problems of the Irish question would be breathtaking if it weren’t so very unsurprising. The Good Friday agreement, which is to say, the entire Northern Irish peace process, complicates and even threatens Brexit. This being so, it is obvious that the fault lies with the Belfast agreement, not with Brexit, and if one of them must go, well, it is not difficult to discern which of them Brexiteers consider more important.
According to the most recent Future of England survey, a joint initiative of the University of Edinburgh and Cardiff University, 81 per cent of Leave voters in England believe destabilising the Northern Irish peace process a price worth paying if that’s what Brexit requires. That’s quite something. But then so is the discovery that 88 per cent of those Leave voters consider Brexit more important than the survival of the United Kingdom. That is, they would accept Scottish independence if doing so guaranteed Brexit.
Now some of this may be a matter of prioritising something that’s happening now — Brexit — over hypothetical scenarios that are, perhaps, too hypothetical to be properly quantified in the here and now. That is, if the UK were on the brink of collapse even Leave voters in England may recalibrate their priorities. And yet, even in the abstract, these findings seem — and feel — telling.
After all, what do they know of the United Kingdom who only England know? Precious little, it sometimes seems. We must risk burning the village to save it. The difference between England and other parts of the realm is that, for many voters, Brexit has become England’s national question whereas it is, in the main, a matter of only subsidiary importance in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Leave votes in England were markedly more likely to be an expression of identity than they were in Scotland or Northern Ireland (Wales, as so often, is sui generis).
Brexit was made in England — unavoidably so, given that England comprises 84 per cent of the UK population — and it was made by Englishness. The more British a resident of England felt, the more likely they were to vote Remain but the impact, or pull, of Britishness was much less powerful than the effect Englishness had on an individual’s propensity to vote Leave.
That impact was even more keenly felt among Conservative voters than it was among Leave supporters. Almost 90 per cent of Tory Leavers think the Northern Irish peace process an acceptable piece of collateral damage on the way to a clean Brexit and a staggering 92 per cent say they think Brexit must be achieved even if doing so were to come at the cost of independence for Scotland. We must take back control even if doing so leaves us a smaller country.
All of which further underlines the radical carelessness at the heart of the Brexit project. For all that many Tory voters and Tory MPs endorsed Brexit, it remains a profoundly unconservative manoeuvre. A Tory sensibility, after all, is supposed to look askance at grand and radical projects; it is supposed to privilege a known, if imperfect, status quo over the unknown consequences of pursuing great adventures. Brexit is a repudiation of that Tory sensibility not its proof, and the carelessness with which its adherents treat the rest of the country is as revealing as it is dispiriting.