Brexit revolution not going to be alright at this rate

The Beatles released the White Album 50 years ago this month. The reissued and nicely remastered version  – officially titled The Beatles – is out now. As their business machine is such an effective capitalist outfit there is a six CD ultra-super-duper-deluxe version full of outtakes from the sessions available. Look out for the early take of the rock version of Revolution, loose-limbed and Stones-like, then a fragmentary early glimpse of the later Let It Be, and the full set of acoustic demos of the album recorded at George Harrison’s house in Esher.

Let me discuss the impact of the White Album for a while. We can get to the parlous passage of Brexit in a minute or two, if we really must. It’s a Brexit code red. First, the White Album.

Only a year separates the beginning of the recording of the White Album and the release of Sergeant Pepper, the band’s technicolour masterpiece issued in late May 1967, yet the two albums might as well have been recorded in different worlds. By 1968, the sassiness of 1966 and sunniness of 1967 are gone. The new aesthetic was scruffy minimalism.

Politics had darkened by then. The imagery was apocalyptic. That spring both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and in Britain in April 1968 Enoch Powell made his reckless and intellectually dishonest Rivers of Blood speech. Simultaneously, in Britain the maniacs of the International Marxist Group, the young Corbynites of their day, were marching and seeking unsuccessfully to smash up the system. Eventually they would settle down to become management consultants and advertising executives in the 1980s, but in 1968 violent student radicalism was chic.

Among the glittering set that had given London its swing, the drugs no longer worked either. That applied most of all to The Beatles. Their pharmaceutical trajectory had initially had a productive impact on their work. They began in Hamburg in the early 1960s with pep pills designed to speed excitement. That gave way to introspection and mood-moderating pot when they encountered Bob Dylan on visiting the US in 1964. Several years later, the making of Sergeant Pepper was conducted amid a naive search for cosmic enlightenment in psychedelics. LSD casualties soon started to pile up. By the time they got to 1968, heroin was where it was at and John Lennon became for a while an addict. Here comes the come down.

No wonder the Beatles produced such a downbeat, disturbing and erratic album that year. The eminent Beatles scholar and sadly departed critic Ian Macdonald in his peerless study of their songs – Revolution in the Head (The Beatles’ records and the 1960s) published in 1994 – described the album as a triumph of sequencing. The clever selection and track running order created by Lennon and McCartney, and their producer George Martin, papered over the cracks. Macdonald described the resulting double album as “the slow afternoon of the Beatles career” with shadows lengthening.

They had started to argue in the studio, with Yoko Ono a constant presence at Lennon’s shoulder. Collectively perhaps they suspected, rightly, they were no longer quite at the cutting edge. Younger artists were overtaking them. Groups such as The Band, fresh from backing Bob Dylan, produced stripped down work. Beards and a back to basics, close to nature, approach were in vogue as opposed to studio trickery. In the US the full-blown, soon to be overblown, “Rock” movement was also being born. And in May 1968 the Rolling Stones had trumped all their rivals, emerging from their own LSD fog of the previous year to deliver the menacing, razor sharp Jumping Jack Flash – a song rooted in rock and roll revivalism but sounding, thanks to its chord structure, percussion and swagger, unlike anything produced to date.

Amid all this, The Beatles were starting to fall apart and the White Album for all its artistic high points is a dark, edgy, eclectic, uneven project that points to their looming breakup.

I mention all this not just as a device to delay having to write about the state of Brexit, okay it’s partly that, but because the remastered White Album I’ve got on repeat play suits the darkening of my mood on the state of British politics. To loosely paraphrase John Lennon: Brexiteers, like me, wanted a revolution. Is it going to be alright?

Right now, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Most Brexiteers I encounter are deeply depressed by the conduct of the whole affair by this Prime Minister. I’m not claiming that in contrast the summer of 2016 was some glorious second summer of love. Perhaps if you voted for Brexit, a constitutional revolution, or counter-revolution against the EU integrationist project, you enjoyed a brief burst of optimism. I know I did.

Through all of the assorted ups and downs since then my view has been that because Brexit is happening the show should be kept on the road as we head towards the exit, in order that a deal can be improvised that might not be perfect but that could form the basis of a pragmatic and sensible way to leave. Life is full of compromises, and eventually there would be a moment at which the UK and the EU found an accommodation in the early hours one morning in Brussels. Not so far.

Incidentally, having seen the ghastly EU negotiate this way – wedded to its legal codes as though its an ancient religion rather than a relatively new and rickety political construct – some of us who voted for Brexit are more keen than ever to leave the EU.

Will that happen? I won’t exhaust you with a run through the latest on the Irish backstop and the fight over whether this or that British cabinet minister thinks they’ve seen a vital paragraph that proves something inconclusive. They’re waiting, like the rest of us, for that moment when a deal is announced and then the parliamentary fireworks can begin.

This weekend the situation seems to be as follows. The optimism on the British side of a few days ago does not seem to be matched in Brussels. The British government signed up to a set of commitments on Ireland and the Northern Ireland border which it now finds difficult to honour, having hoped to fudge it all away later.

If a way to do that cannot be found, then the talks fail.

Even if there is a deal, the Commons numbers to deliver it are in ever more doubt, with hardline Tory Brexiteers prepared to vote against on the grounds that it is a betrayal, along with (it seems) the DUP, Tory Remain fanatics, the SNP, and much of the Labour party. The Tory whips hope they can rely on some Labour moderates to back a deal, to minimise the chances of Corbyn getting in somehow in the event of a meltdown.

An alternative plan is mentioned by cabinet ministers, in which a “no deal deal” emerges straight after Christmas.  Close to £20bn would go to the EU, perhaps, in return for the rescue of the 20-month transition period to pacify business. Various other temporary arrangements would be on the table. The implementation of such a plan would presumably require a rapid switch to an emergency Prime Minister, the negotiating strategy of the incumbent having collapsed amid scenes of shame and recrimination. Ultra-Remainers saying there is no chance of a no deal deal should consider the beginnings of legislation proposed in Paris this week to smooth travel, security and trade if the Brexit talks do fail. A lot could happen quickly in such a crisis.

Meanwhile, the emboldened Remain forces in the Commons are determined to stop it even getting that far. They are preparing to try to amend whatever legislation there is, or to use any device, to get a second referendum or a delay to Brexit.

Watching this shambles, a central concern must surely be what happens to the tattered fabric of the country if Brexit is stopped. A fpro-Brexit friend outside the Westminster Brexit bubble tells me that the weary Brits will just shrug, and blame politicians for squabbling too much. Depressingly, for once, I suspect he’s wrong. Parliament would have refused to implement departure from the EU, contrary to promises given. Anger would be considerable among leavers. Rebel Tory MPs if they help deliver a rerun of the referendum will never be forgiven.

Then there’s the hatred, which is building and building. We’re well beyond the “they started it” point. Both sides started it. It is what it is, and the main combatants and their supporters cannot abide the other side.

The hatred directed at Brexiteers by smug, intolerant, ultra-liberal, anti-Brexit types is intensifying. Some of it, on social media, comes from  people whose whole schtick is supposed to be a commitment to rational enquiry and liberal respect for others. Several prominent Remainers on social media have, I am sorry to say, been driven quite mad and privately their friends urge Brexiteers not to respond for fear that it will only make them more disturbed.

The Brexiteers, who spent years castigating supposedly know-nothing elites, cannot complain about rough language. But Brexiteers, stunned for now, are likely to rally and dismay could quickly turn to well-funded rage, perhaps even involving the splitting of the Tory party.

In such a horrible climate a second referendum would be unlikely to be a healing experience. The campaign would be nastier than a Donald Trump rally after some hecklers dressed as Hillary Clinton and the news team from CNN turn up and try to break up proceedings.

A rerun of the 2016 referendum would be worth it in only one respect, that is for the comedy of seeing Remain put together a campaign that somehow has to sell President Macron’s EU Army, bigger bills thanks to the end of the British rebate (the Commission has said it is gone), and the EU demanding we undertook not to hold another referendum for at least  100 years.

Who would win a second referendum if it happened? I’m not sure that even matters very much, because the losing side would not accept the result. They hate each other too much. Ultra-Remainers don’t accept referendum results, we know. And Brexiteers if they lost would most likely spin out a new populist party aimed at causing mayhem for the Tories and Labour, all under a banner of implementing the 2016 result and campaigning endlessly for decades against the leaders of Remain.

None of this is alluring. Let’s hope there is an acceptable deal soon and that it can pass the Commons before Christmas. If not, by accident, Corbyn might get in and the UK ends up, so to speak, back in the USSR.