To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies … Gerorge Orwell on Doublethink
“Throughout the world we were famous for common law, for Magna Carta, for integrity in treaty-making.” – Matthew Syed, columnist for the Sunday Times in Johnson’s Brexit chicanery has led us into Doublethink Britain .
Hmmm … the British did not make treaty with aboriginal people in Australia. Also first nations people would reject “the principle that the Queen Victoria and her military governors in Australia were not above the law (Magna Carta)”. Take governor Arthur who set about the genocide of the original inhabitants of Van Diemens Land during the Black Wars in the 1830s.
Another theory about Boris Johnson – a cockroach entered his body, determined to become Prime Minister. Kafka trumps Orwell.
Read on, it is well worth the “widest circulation, especially for the benefit of people who don’t want more than a couple of updates a year on what’s happening in the UK“. – Ian Curr, ed., 13 June 2023. Thanks to TD.
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Johnson’s Brexit chicanery has led us into Doublethink Britain
The nation is trapped in an anxiety dream. We still haven’t faced up to the consequences of Leaving Europe
‘To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it …”
I quote Orwell’s description of doublethink almost in full because I think it offers a useful lens to understand the psychological state of the UK on the weekend that Boris Johnson — perhaps the most consequential British politician of this century — announced his retirement from parliament, if not yet from politics.
We always knew Johnson was a skilled deceiver and dissimulator. In his book Chums, Simon Kuper tells of a formative experience at Balliol College, Oxford, when “good old Boris” was caught by his classics tutor, Jonathan Barnes, copying a translation straight out of a book. Johnson reputedly apologised: “I’ve been so busy I just didn’t have time to put in the mistakes.” It was an early lesson in how a winning smile can get you out of a corner and elicit a giggle. As Evelyn Waugh remarked in Brideshead Revisited: “Those that have charm don’t really need brains.”
This charming deceit reached its acme during the Brexit campaign, the high point of Johnson’s career, when the former classicist cast a spell over a sufficient number of Brits to conjure up the most remarkable juxtaposition: the worst decision of the postwar period gaining the largest democratic mandate. Many have pointed out that Johnson didn’t himself believe in Brexit, siding with Leave only after calculating that it could help him claim the leadership from party members who had on the whole always been hostile to the EU. But what does it say about us that the decision of one man, a proven liar with a poor grasp of details, was able to sway so many on that fateful day?
Perhaps the most significant aspect of all this — and I think we have to face up to its enormity — is that Johnson has thereby led the nation into a labyrinth of Orwellian dimensions. Consider, for a moment, the way the promise of Brexit has worked out. We were sold a vision of a nation freed from the Teutonic chains of the EU, sunlit uplands discovered by our creativity and drive, a nation exercising sovereignty rather than a hidebound vassal of monolithic European institutions. Johnson, at times, almost seemed to believe his own rhetoric.
Seven years on, we are facing the worst cost of living crisis in history. Our economy has spluttered, trade in goods has fallen and life expectancy for the poorest may be falling, too. The lives of real people up and down the nation — in Remain and Leave areas — are diminished, crueller, thinner. Most of the free-trade deals vanished in a puff of smoke — Johnson couldn’t even deliver free trade across the United Kingdom. The much-vaunted extra money for the NHS? Patients face the longest waiting lists in history. The slash and burn of “unnecessary” regulations? Much of the absurd Retained EU Law Bill was scrapped when Brexiters came face to face with what it would actually mean.
When it comes to immigration, the reality is almost beyond satire. The central claim of Leave was that freedom of movement had led to the nation being “swamped” and that the exercise of “sovereignty” would restore control. Since Brexit, small-boat crossings have reached record levels (who knew that international collaboration might be needed to control them?) and legal immigration, fuelled by Johnson’s points-based system, has reached an unprecedented net figure of 600,000. As for the idea that Brexit would enable us to deliver tax cuts, this particular strand of magical thinking was confidently enacted by Johnson’s successor and destroyed in a week-long bonfire on the financial markets.
The point is that almost every claim of Brexiters has collided with reality and crumbled. And yet we are still lost in a labyrinth a majority voted for, our politicians searching for a vocabulary that hints at the disaster of Brexit without admitting it, that seeks to tackle its symptoms without addressing its cause. Welcome to Doublethink Britain, the nation many of us know and love reduced to a form of political theatre where nothing is quite as it seems, where truths go unacknowledged and where the elephant in the room is never mentioned. We all know it is phoney, but it is as if we are trapped in a collective anxiety dream.
This is Johnson’s legacy. They say that owners take on the complexion of their dogs, but I can’t help thinking that the UK has, in certain respects, taken on the qualities of the former PM. His deceptiveness entered the body politic like a poison. The strength of Britain was always in our national character; the commitment to due process and fair play. Throughout the world we were famous for common law, for Magna Carta, for integrity in treaty-making. That is why we were able to borrow at favourable rates.
This — and it pains me to say it — has been grievously weakened. I could cite so many ways in which Johnson took an axe to the moral struts of our system, but the most graphic was signing an international treaty — the EU withdrawal agreement — while planning to breach it. Note that it is impossible for a prime minister to engage in such an act of reputational vandalism alone. As with his deceits over Partygate, it required him to turn civil servants, special advisers, MPs and ministers into accomplices. One thinks of Allegra Stratton, a self-evidently decent person, breaking down as she sought to explain why she was filmed practising how to lie on her boss’s behalf.
Many are delighted that Johnson is stepping down from parliament. The first image that came to my mind on Friday night was a body politic having eaten a rancid meal and, after a period of rising nausea, vomiting it out liberally and with a sigh of relief. On reflection, though, that is a spurious metaphor. Brexit is still with us; its legacy lives on. Doublethink Britain is trapped in the mental gymnastics of realising we made a terrible mistake while our leading politicians can’t bring themselves to acknowledge it; struggling with the consequences while lacking the courage to face up to them. It is as if we are collectively traumatised by the toxic legacy of Johnson, cowering indecisively while buffeted by the winds of history.
It is a cruel impasse and a tragic one. Soon, I hope, a politician will rise up to draw a curtain over this sad episode in British history. Until then, Johnson’s shadow will linger over the nation he claims to love, which he has liberally — and with the support of millions of voters — trashed.
Matthew Syed,
columnist for the Sunday Times