The ‘remoaner elite’, the civil service, the BBC, universities, unions, refugees: anything is blamed but Brexit itself, says Guardian columnist Jonathan Freedland
net annual migration figures published next week could see a rise to 700,000 or even 1 million. Turns out Britain needs migrants – but now they have to come from far away, rather than in reciprocal movement between us and our nearest neighbours.
Given all this, what are the Brexiters to do? Some still deny reality altogether, insisting that we should disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes. The rest admit thathas failed, and then face one of two options. Either they can atone for their role in visiting this calamity upon the nation and move to correct it. Or they can blame others for not doing it right.
On Newsnight, Farage made the latter choice. Yes, it was true that Britain had “not actually benefited from Brexit economically” but that was because “useless” politicians had “mismanaged this totally”. It’s the manoeuvre perfected in an earlier era by western communists confronted by the brute realities of the Soviet Union: nothing wrong with the communist idea, they insisted, it just hadn’t been implemented properly.
But that logic is tricky for the Brexiters, because it’s they who have been in charge. The exit deal was signed, sealed and pushed through parliament by one of their own, Boris Johnson, and a conviction Brexiter is in Downing Street now, in the form ofSome point to Sunak himself,, who this month halted the planned shredding of thousands of EU-tainted regulations.
This is hardly a new dynamic. Nationalism, with its impossible promise of a perfect future, always has to have a traitor to blame for perfection’s delayed arrival. That is the process we are witnessing now: the steady nurturing of a stab-in-the-back myth for Brexit. History suggests that this hunt for the wielder of the treacherous dagger will only get nastier.
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