The staggering beauty of Brexit

There should be street parties today. There should be Union Jack bunting flapping from every lamppost. Children should be wearing their own clothes to school and scoffing sweets instead of learning. For it is the tenth anniversary of Brexit. The tenth anniversary of the British people’s gloriously rude intrusion into the history books. The tenth anniversary of one of the greatest democratic scupperings this country or any country has ever witnessed. Let the bells peal for that momentous day when in our millions we said No to globalism.

Brexit must be the most overanalysed political event of the 21st century so far. It’s certainly the most mocked, the most defamed, the most lamented. The very word still elicits hives in polite society. Rich liberals audibly gag when you say you’re a Brexiteer. Even in the Brexit camp, sobriety has ushered out passion. ‘We can still make Brexit work’, they contritely cry, overlooking that Brexit ‘worked’ the very minute it happened, the very minute it brought to bear the democratic yearnings of the people against the complacent machinery of state.

What gets lost in all the handwringing, in all the waves of Brexit Derangement Syndrome that have ailed our idiot elites, is the sheer beauty of Brexit. The wonder of this event, this extraordinary vision of a people forcing its rulers to discard their entire belief system, risks being smothered by cold, overwrought scrutiny. The Brexit narrative has congealed like slag around the notion that it was a rash decision, probably a bad one, but it happened, so let’s work with it. No, no, no. This myth must not stand. It is time for Brexit to take its place alongside the English Revolution, the Chartist revolt and the Suffragette uprising as a heroic English strike for the rights of the people against the tyranny of distant rule.

I am always flummoxed when I meet a Brexitphobe. I do my best to understand them, to fathom those tears they wept when we severed ties with the brutish oligarchs of Brussels who plunged the Greek working class into penury and overruled democratic votes everywhere from the Netherlands to Ireland. But it’s a struggle. Primarily because there was not one thing about Brexit Day I didn’t enjoy. The ashen look on David Dimbleby’s face when he announced the result. Keith Vaz crying. The wave of glee in the Midlands and the North as communities treated like shit for decades realised they had knocked history off its course. Honestly, take me back. Inject it into my veins.

From the start, it was clear to us at spiked what we were witnessing. ‘The people have asserted themselves’, we said on 24 June 2016. We christened it a ‘brilliant revolt’. It was the largest exercise in democracy in the history of these isles – 17.4million souls voted to leave the EU. The cry was most deafening among the working class. Just 41 per cent of the AB professional classes voted Brexit compared with a staggering 64 per cent of the ‘unskilled’ workers of the DE classes. The ‘left behind’ have spoken, said the weeping commentariat. I always hated that phrase. These people weren’t ‘left behind’ – they were actively decommissioned, rendered workless and voiceless by a ruling class that recoils from riff-raff opinion. Leave politics to us, the experts – that was the plea of the elites. ‘Fuck that’, came the people’s reply on Brexit Day. It was the ‘fuck that’ heard around the world.

‘Take back control’ was the slogan of the Brexit camp. This was a democratic crusade to restore sovereignty to Britain, to wrest back our law-making powers from commissioners in Europe not one of us could name, far less vote out of power. That was it. It wasn’t xenophobia. It wasn’t Europhobia. It wasn’t a tantrum by low-information Little Englanders. It was a people’s struggle to make democracy meaningful again. In the eyes of the everyday Brit, it was wrong – criminally wrong – that a foreign body could extract tax from our nation and then write laws we had to live by but had no say over. It felt like a knife at the neck of our democracy.

It blew my mind when the Remainer elites painted Brexit as an alien pox on decent Blighty, even as reminiscent of that most foreign of ideologies – Nazism. For in truth, there is nothing more radically English than refusing to live by laws over which you have no democratic mastery. ‘Unnatural, irrational, sinful, wicked, unjust, devilish and tyrannical it is’, wrote our 17th-century radical John Lilburne, ‘for any man whatsoever… to appropriate and assume unto himself a power, authority and jurisdiction to rule, govern or reign over any sort of men in the world without their free consent’. Ladies, too. ‘We were willing to break laws that we might force men to give us the right to make laws’, said Emmeline Pankhurst 250 years later.

This is the golden thread of England’s stirring contribution to the global fight for democratic rights – that no man (or woman) should be permitted to rule over any other without their express consent. Or as Tony Benn succinctly put it in the final of the five questions he encouraged us to ask of every governing body, especially the EU: ‘How can we get rid of you?’ We couldn’t get rid of European commissioners. They were appointed. Sinful, wicked and devilish it was that bureaucrats beyond our reach were writing laws for us. With Brexit, the people of this kingdom did as their forebears had and resisted the false authority of the unaccountable. It was another English revolution.

The counterrevolution was swift and insane. The chattering classes libelled us as racists, fascists, pigs. ‘Gammon’ they called Brexit voters. It brought to mind Edmund Burke’s lamenting of the ‘swinish multitude’ that motored the revolutions of the 18th century. Us piggies, us cloven-footed excuses for human beings, were held responsible for every political ill. ‘Brexit has destroyed Britain!’, cried the rich who destroyed Britain. The classism was off the scale. We were called ‘ignorant hooligans’. ‘It is as if the sewers have burst’, said Nick Cohen, because to them we are shit, effluent, the excrement in the body politic. A left-wing writer described kicking a ‘nest of gammon’ – wait, are we pigs or insects? – and discovering soulless creatures who require ‘regular spoon-feeding from the trashy tabloids’ to tell them what to think. We’re so intellectually inferior, you see?

I knew class hatred existed, of course. But never had I seen it so red in tooth and claw. Columnists openly said the little people had been ‘misled by false prospectuses, by lies’. The same was said about the Chartists’ fight for the right to vote for working-class men – that these toiling unfortunates lack ‘ripened wisdom’ and thus are ‘more exposed than any other class… to be converted to the vicious ends of faction’. There’s only one thing for it, said Foreign Policy magazine in the wake of Brexit: ‘It’s time for the elites to rise up against the ignorant masses.’ You know what? I’d like to see that. Park, for a minute, that such violent dreams of mass subjugation summed up the black heart of Brexitphobia. Cherish, instead, the vision of London’s meat-dodging middle classes with their Euro-flag face paint going to battle against working-class lovers of democracy in Thurrock, Great Yarmouth, Bolsover.

‘Can we make Brexit work?’, people ask. It’s such an odd question. For what it means is: Can we make a nation work? The great thing about Brexit is that it ripped away all the insulation between the dreams of the people and the decision-making of the elites. It dragged law-making back home by the scruff of its neck. It robbed our rulers of a hiding place, of that old snivelling excuse: ‘We have to do this, it’s what the EU wants.’ Yes, our borders are still broken, immigration remains high, and wokeness runs riot. But we now know exactly who is responsible. Them, in Westminster, people over whom we have power. So use that power, just as the Levellers, the Chartists, the Suffragettes and the Brexiteers implored you to. These heroes of history gave you a gift – don’t squander it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.