Heroic Failure Quotes

“Even as a game of chance, however, Brexit is especially odd. It is a surreal casino in which the high-rollers are playing for pennies at the blackjack tables while the plebs are stuffing their life savings into the slot machines. For those who can afford risk, there is very little on the table; for those who cannot, entire livelihoods are at stake. The backbench anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry rose to her feet in the Commons in July 2018, eyed her Brexiteer colleagues and let fly: ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted Leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.’ But if that’s not what people voted for, it is emphatically what they got: if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Even as a game of chance, however, Brexit is especially odd. It is a surreal casino in which the high-rollers are playing for pennies at the blackjack tables while the plebs are stuffing their life savings into the slot machines. For those who can afford risk, there is very little on the table; for those who cannot, entire livelihoods are at stake. The backbench anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry rose to her feet in the Commons in July 2018, eyed her Brexiteer colleagues and let fly: ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted Leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.’ But if that’s not what people voted for, it is emphatically what they got: if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“This may be the last stage of imperialism–having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea’ – TURKISH PROVERB”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“His second expedition in 1845 was deeply Brexitlike. As Barczewski explains, it was undertaken in a spirit of blithe optimism: ‘Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners.’4 If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in unmapped wastelands, it may be because the same attitudes have been at work.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“This is one possible answer to the deflationary sensation so perfectly captured in a question mark in Jane Gardam’s novel of the dissolution of the Raj, Old Filth: ‘When empires end, there’s often a dazzling finale – then—?’31 Well, perhaps empires don’t quite end when you think they do. Perhaps they have a final moment of zombie existence. This may be the last stage of imperialism – having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“This desire to experience the vicarious thrills of humiliation is possible only in a country that did not know what national humiliation is really like. But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled. In the Brexit negotiations, the idea of national humiliation moved from fiction to reality. There was a strange ecstasy of shame: ‘Britain faces a terrible choice: between the humiliation of a deal dictated by Brussels; and the chaos of crashing out of the EU”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“As he confessed in 2002, ‘Some of my most joyous hours have been spent in a state of semi-incoherence, composing foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp.’20 The fact that there was no ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp (it is still freely available over the counter) was no impediment to the foam-flecked hymns of hate. On the contrary, being pure fiction made the story beautifully elastic. Like the tale of Marina’s toast, this tiny seed of grievance could blossom into a monstrous oppression.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“you’ve thrilled yourself with these dark imaginings you end with the ultimate in wish-fulfilment: the EU is a front for a German cabal and this will save Brexit. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers. For some of those at the top of the Labour Party, the idea of the EU as a mere front for the bosses and moguls of Europe was a reason to be secretly pleased that Brexit would allow Britain to escape their clutches and build socialism in one country.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Her decision to do so – when she had a working majority in Parliament – was not pure vanity. It was the inevitable result of the völkisch rhetoric she had adopted when she told her first Tory Party conference as leader that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’, openly evoking the far-right (and Stalinist) trope of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ who did not deserve citizenship.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Returning from a summit in Paris three months after the referendum, Wilson ‘proudly announced that he has saved Britain from the horrors of the “Euroloaf” and “Eurobeer”. “An imperial pint is good enough for me and for the British people, and we want it to stay that way.”’11 Wilson undoubtedly knew that this was nonsense, but he also knew, as Johnson would discover, that it was the kind of nonsense that sold well. The British had an insatiable appetite for every kind of Euromenace to their food and drink.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The new ‘Dunkirk spirit’ is a kind of hysteria in which the ordinary vicissitudes of life (especially those involving Brits abroad among foreigners) are raised to the level of epic suffering.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The great Marxist historian of England, E. P. Thompson, writing in the Sunday Times in the run-up to the 1975 referendum, gave this disgust an explicitly anti-Common Market turn, brilliantly fusing English puritanism with anti-capitalist politics: ‘It is about the belly. A market is about consumption. The Common Market is conceived of as a distended stomach: a large organ with various traps, digestive chambers and fiscal acids, assimilating a rich diet of consumer goods… This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London.’8”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“One genuinely distinctive aspect of Englishness had long been a decidedly uncontinental taste in food. George Orwell, trying to explain the English character in 1944, wrote, ‘The difference in habits, and especially in food and language, makes it very hard for English working people to get on with foreigners. Their diet differs a great deal from that of any European nation, and they are extremely conservative about it. As a rule, they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish. They regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The quisling theme was also endemic in the revolt against black and Asian migrants. Immigration was proof that a treacherous elite was selling out the victory of the war. ‘The white working class are redrawn,’ as Schofield writes, ‘as victims of a traitorous state… This was, he insisted, an invasion not unlike that which was threatened in 1940.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Asked on the eve of the referendum how EU membership made them feel, voters were given a list of eight words, four positive (happy, hopeful, confident, proud) and four negative (angry, uneasy, disgusted, afraid) and invited to choose up to four of them. Feelings of ‘unease’ dominated, with 44 per cent selecting this word, as against just 26 per cent who went for the most popular positive term, ‘hopeful’. No other positive word was selected by more than 14 per cent.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“[The] crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from the 'heart of empire' to 'occupied colony'. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. The dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The inflation of language is striking. Exotic flavours of crisps are suddenly part of ‘Britain’s heritage’, on a par with Stonehenge, Shakespeare and the six wives of Henry VIII. The German nationality of the commissioner Martin Bangemann allows the story to become another episode of Anglo-German conflict (‘der crunch’) – like two world wars. And in Taylor’s rent-a-quote comment, there is a double act of hyping. A packet of crisps becomes a thing that ‘affects your life’, and the alleged assault on the right to produce and consume it in strange varieties is the demolition of democracy. There is no point in voting at all because some bloke in Brussels will just decide what you can and cannot eat.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“For reasons that may puzzle anthropologists long into the future, the prawn cocktail – a few (hopefully unfrozen) crustaceans placed in a glass on a bed of shredded lettuce, smothered in a pink Marie Rose sauce and sprinkled with paprika had become the quintessential English idea of fine dining.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“On 18 May 2016, a month before the vote, Nigel Farage told the BBC ‘it’s legitimate to say that if people feel they have lost control completely – and we have lost control… then violence is the next step’.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“There were many factors at work, but the proximate cause was undoubtedly the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In part, the new English nationalism is thus another example of the dominant power mimicking the gestures of small-nation ‘liberation’ movements – the English were reacting to and mirroring the emergence of a potent and effective Scottish nationalism.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The English revolution was conscious of itself: it is important to note that people in England knew that this was happening, even if most of the political and media establishments ignored it. In 2011, 60 per cent agreed to the proposition ‘People in England have become more aware of English national identity’.11 This self-awareness was also largely self-generated – tabloid jingoism, except when it came to sports that England played as a distinct country, remained ‘British’. Even the most obvious vehicle for English nationalism hid itself behind the rubric of the UK Independence Party. As the IPPR authors put it ‘the strengthening and politicisation of English identity is taking place in the absence of any formal political mobilisation. Englishness, in other words, has a momentum of its own.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“On the lunatic fringe of Brexit – a fringe long enough to get in the eyes of rational governance – there is a belief that England can find itself only when the remnants of socialism and liberalism are burned off in the crucible of pain. Suffering is not a side effect of the great project; it is the medicine.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“And as well as the sore tooth, there is the broken umbrella. A nation state is, first and foremost, a shelter. In the hard rain of neoliberal globalization, people know that they cannot be fully protected. But they do reasonably expect an umbrella over their heads. The problem is that the umbrella is broken, its material tattered, its struts sticking out like bared bones. The welfare state that kept self-pity at bay has been relentlessly undermined. Its basic promise – security against poverty and indignity – is, for too many, hollow.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“the far-right is the white man’s #MeToo movement. Not only am I not guilty, but I am in fact a victim.”
― Fintan O'Toole, The Politics of Pain: Postwar England and the Rise of Nationalism

“This mentality is by no means exclusive to the Right. There is a long leftist tradition of seeing continental slavishness as a threat to English liberty, and of imagining England as the only green and pleasant land in which the new Jerusalem could be built.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The more highly we think of ourselves, the sorrier we feel for ourselves when we do not get what we know we deserve.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“Over the past twenty-five years, the English have built up a national grudge – perhaps due to disappointed expectations after winning the War – and now it is so firmly established that the country resembles one of those Strindbergian households where everybody nags and tries to make everybody else miserable. On the other hand, the Germans at the end of the War had the same advantage as Britain at the beginning – of facing a crisis situation that left no room for resentment or petulance. The result was the German economic recovery. Meanwhile, like spoilt children, the English sit around scowling and quarrelling, and hoping for better times.”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

“The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed it has no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture which we don’t like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.6”
― Fintan O'Toole, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain