Murderous Intent and Breathtakingly Cynical Opportunism: The Contours of the Brexit-Fuelled New English Civil War

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The last few days have been a particularly dispiriting time to be living in Britain, as anger over the failure of the UK to leave the EU — anger deliberately provoked by our disgraceful Prime Minister Boris Johnson — has begun manifesting itself in threats of, and incitements to violence by prominent Brexiteers.

Boris Johnson, elected by just 92,153 Tory Party members, and with no majority in Parliament, is largely leading this thrust towards violent, and even murderous intent. Last week, Johnson, who is aggressively pushing for a no-deal Brexit on October 31, was compelled to recall Parliament, after the Supreme Court ruled that his decision to prorogue (suspend) it was unlawful, but when he appeared before MPs, he not only failed to apologise, but suggested that the court’s ruling was wrong.

Since then, he has begun suggesting that the justices should be approved by Parliament, which is alarming in and of itself, but the biggest immediate problem with his rhetoric is that it adds fuel to Brexiteers’ notion of judges as “the enemy”, and as “traitors”, which began when, after the referendum, the High Court supported a lawsuit brought by the businesswoman Gina Miller, establishing that Parliament had the right to be consulted before Article 50 (triggering the UK’s departure from the EU) was invoked by the then-Prime Minister Theresa May.

Anyone with a keen sense of irony was aware that sovereignty in the UK resides in Parliament — which is what those who voted for Brexit are supposed to want returned to the UK — but it seems that their notion of sovereignty is hopelessly confused, and that what they prefer instead is the Daily Mail fuelling their seemingly insatiable desire to be victims by publishing a front page describing the judges as “Enemies of the People.”

In addition, when Parliament reconvened on Wednesday, Boris Johnson indulged in a spree of inflammatory rhetoric, calling the Benn amendment, passed by Parliament to block a no-deal Brexit by forcing the PM to ask for an extension beyond the deadline of October 31, if a deal has not been agreed with the EU, the “surrender bill”, and regularly mentioning opposition to a no-deal Brexit as “capitulation.”

However, when a number of women MPs expressed their fears about the death threats they regularly receive from Brexiteers, in response to the increasingly febrile atmosphere in which Johnson is playing a major part, he dismissed those fears as “humbug”, and, adding insult to injury, suggested — both illogically and offensively — that the best way to honour the memory of Jo Cox, the pro-Remain MP who was murdered by a far-right extremist just before the referendum, was to “get Brexit done.”

The next day, a man was arrested in Birmingham after banging on the windows of the constituency office of Labour MP Jess Phillips — who “revealed last year that she had received some 600 threats of rape in the space of 12 months”— and reportedly shouting “Fascist” at her, but instead of backing down Johnson has continued to defend his position, brushing off critics including his own sister, Rachel, who told Sky News, “My brother is using words like surrender and capitulation as if the people standing in the way of the blessed will of the people as defined by 17.4m votes in 2016 should be hung, drawn, quartered, tarred and feathered. I think that is highly reprehensible language to use.”

On Friday, former minister Amber Rudd, who “quit the government and resigned the Conservative whip earlier this month in protest at the prime minister’s policies”, also weighed in, declaring, “The sort of language I’m afraid we’ve seen more and more of coming out from No 10 does incite violence. It’s the sort of language people think legitimises a more aggressive approach and sometimes violence.” Rudd compared Johnson’s behaviour to that of Donald Trump during the US presidential election in 2016, and added that “the casual approach to safety of MPs and their staff [was] immoral”, as she also urged ministers to “consider their own judgments rather than be desperately loyal.”

Meanwhile, the escalation of inflammatory rhetoric has continued unabated. Johnson’s chief advisor, the public school-educated, self-styled rebel Dominic Cummings, who has contempt for the whole of the British establishment, which he petulantly wants to destroy, and was campaign director of the Vote Leave campaign, was confronted last week by Karl Turner, the Labour MP for Hull East. Turner told Cummings that Johnson’s attitude in the House of Commons had been “appalling”, and that he had received threats that were “incredibly threatening” and “credible”, Cummings’ only response was “get Brexit done”, his and Johnson’s insistent mantra, which Cummings, presumably, thinks will have as much resonance as his winning phrase for Vote Leave — “take back control.”

In addition, the posturing provocateur Brendan O’Neill, a self-styled ‘libertarian’, who has gone from the far-left of the political spectrum to the far-right over a tawdry career as an alleged journalist, was inexplicably invited onto the BBC’s Politics Live show, where he said he was surprised that there hadn’t been riots on the streets regarding Britain’s failure to leave the EU, and, when challenged, said that there “should be” riots.

And in Newport, at a Brexit Party rally, Nigel Farage told the crowd that, “once Brexit is done, we will take the knife [to] overpaid pen-pushers in Whitehall.” He later claimed that he was only suggesting job cuts, but in today’s political climate words that suggest physical violence will undoubtedly be taken literally.

Perhaps some readers think I’m being unnecessarily alarmist, but it only takes a brief foray into the sewer of the Brexiteers’ social media accounts to reveal that violence and death threats are being advocated, urged and encouraged on an ongoing basis and to an alarming degree.

Last month, Robert Vidler, a 64-year old from Harrow, was jailed for 18 weeks after making threatening phone calls to six MPs. Tory MP Nicky Morgan was told her “days were numbered”, former Tory MP Nick Boles (who resigned the whip in April and is now an independent MP) was told, “we know where you live”, and was threatened with having his throat cut, Labour MP (and shadow Brexit secretary) Keir Starmer was told that he was a walking “dead man” and a “traitor”, and that Vidler would “cut his neck”, and Dominic Grieve, one of 21 Tory rebels sacked by Boris Johnson, was told, “You’re dead, Grieve, we know where you and your family live.”

And just days ago, a serving British soldier, who is now being investigated, sent a tweet to the Labour MP Angela Rayner warning her that she will “perish when civil war comes”, and suggesting that people who voted for Brexit would be “gunning for blood if we don’t leave.”

The undiminishing insanity of Brexit

And behind it all, of course, is the reason for all this anger — the UK leaving the EU, which, although voted for by a slim majority of those who could be bothered to turn up to vote in the EU referendum on June 23, 2016, remains an aspiration of — to be blunt— colossal stupidity.

Leaving the EU — and most particularly without a deal — will be the most insane act of voluntary economic suicide undertaken by any country in living memory, fatal to a huge number of businesses, leading to shortages of food and of crucial medicines, the probability of some sort of martial law, seemingly unreconcilable problems regarding the Irish border, which may well reignite “the Troubles”, a renewed push for independence in remain-majority Scotland, and chaos for the millions of British citizens living in EU countries. EU nationals living in the UK, meanwhile, have been treated as second-class citizens since the referendum, and are now required to jump though all kinds of dubious hoops regarding their “settled status” in the UK.

Three years and seven months since David Cameron formally announced the referendum, in February 2016, I have still not heard a single coherent argument about why it is necessary for the UK to leave the EU. Apparently, the notion of regaining our sovereignty was considered to be of great significance, but for the most part people seem to have been successfully lied to during the referendum campaign — by the likes of Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson, who notoriously told them that, by leaving the EU, we would regain £350m a week to spend on the NHS, which was patently untrue.

Clearly, what was also hugely significant was the notion that we would stem immigration to the UK — but again, those pushing this message mostly glossed over the fact that our economy largely relies on immigration: in the NHS, in farming, and in countless low-paid jobs that most disgruntled British people haven’t even thought about, and as Aditya Chakrabortty of the Guardian explained last year, the real damage has been caused by the cynical “ages of austerity” introduced by the Tories in 2010.

In an article I wrote just two weeks after the referendum, I shared with readers a passage from an astonishing briefing by Chatham House (aka the Royal Institute of International Affairs), entitled, ‘Britain, the EU and the Sovereignty Myth’, in which it was noted that, “Apart from EU immigration, the British government still determines the vast majority of policy over every issue of greatest concern to British voters – including health, education, pensions, welfare, monetary policy, defence and border security. The arguments for leaving also ignore the fact that the UK controls more than 98 per cent of its public expenditure.” (emphasis added)

Moreover, while there are different groups of Brexiteers — the dispossessed in places that have suffered horribly since Margaret Thatcher started Britain’s neoliberal power-grab in the ’80s (which is what the problem is, rather than the EU), old rural Tories obsessed with a fantasy past viewed through rose-tinted glasses, Lexiteers, who are right to dislike neoliberal tendencies within the EU, but surely misguided in thinking that isolation in an independent country in Tory control is any kind of solution, and, in particular, the powerful backers of Brexit, who, while selling the notion of “taking back control”, seem actually to be primarily enraged in profiteering, making a fortune by betting on the Brexit-fed collapse of the pound, whilst simultaneously believing that they will be able to continue making a fortune in a post-Brexit Britain shorn of all protections for its workers and citizens, a slave pool to be exploited by whatever plunderers these opportunists can get into bed with.

Rachel Johnson also touched on this when criticising her brother last week, attributing his aggressive behaviour to the people behind him “who have invested billions in shorting the pound in expectation of a no-deal Brexit.” This claim has since been picked up on by the former chancellor Philip Hammond (one of the 21 rebels sacked by Boris Johnson), who stated in a column for the Times yesterday that, “Boris Johnson asserts, ever more boldly, that we will leave the EU with or without a deal. But as his sister has reminded us, he is backed by speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit – and there is only one outcome that works for them: a crash-out no-deal Brexit that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring.”

Hammond, in turn, inspired Nick Macpherson, former permanent secretary to the Treasury, to state today that he was “right to question the political connections of some of the hedge funds with a financial interest in no deal”, adding, They are shorting the [pound] and the country, with the British people the main loser.”

Will they get away with it? That remains to be seen, but while I still hope that the majority of the British establishment, which supports staying in the EU, will somehow prevail, I can see a number of bleak futures, reinforcing the notion of the new English civil war I mention in the title of this article. I’ve always believed that MPs, who support staying in the EU by a clear majority — should decisively shut down Brexit themselves, and then hold a General Election the day after, secure that have done the right thing for the country, but that seems as unlikely as ever, and, instead, the drive seems to be for a second referendum, following a withdrawal agreement approved by MPs, in which the British people can actually decide what kind of Brexit they want — or don’t want.

But for hardcore Brexiteers, any second referendum will be perceived as a betrayal, and in fact, over the last three years, the most rabid enthusiasts for Brexit seem to have decided that they want a no-deal Brexit (even though that wasn’t what anyone was asked to vote for, and also wasn’t the intention of most of those pushing for Brexit at the time), and are increasingly prepared to suffer financially as a result.

None of them seem to have realised that the most cynical of Brexit’s backers have been profiting all along, while others have joined in since, having realised that Brexit offers an unprecedented opportunity to smash the state and profit from the unfettered plunder of whatever remains of Britain’s assets.

In the bleakest scenario — a no-deal Brexit — I can even imagine that, however disastrous the collapse of the British economy will be, the most rabid Brexiteers will still blame the EU, or immigrants, or both, and may well — having so enthusiastically shown their contempt for judges and for any MPs or journalists, or be frank, anyone else who disagrees with them — embrace a far-right dictatorship as the ideal way forward.

These are genuine fears of mine, but while I’m happy to be reassured by anyone who disagrees with my fears, I can say confidently that, if the far-right drift continues in the UK, those who disagree will not capitulate without a fight.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (click on the following for Amazon in the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US), and for his photo project ‘The State of London’ he publishes a photo a day from seven years of bike rides around the 120 postcodes of the capital.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of a new documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the resistance continues.

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