In March, openDemocracy’s founder Anthony Barnett embarked on a bold experiment, to write a book about the UK’s impending referendum on EU membership, publishing a chapter each week about the real forces that have been unlocked by the debate around it. Blimey, it could be Brexit! was an ongoing interrogation of the “meta-politics of this strange event”, from the corporate populism of the elite, to the strained silence of the Labour Party and the unique political energies shaping Scotland today. Now it is now available in a single pdf that you can download into a reader or tablet, just click on the top right hand corner of the above.
I began following Blimey in April, with the publication of its fourth chapter, ‘Would you believe it, Boris and Gove defy corporate fatalism’. It wasn’t chance that drew me to this installment, but an almost magnetic attraction to its headline, which so brilliantly captures the eerie energy that is now breaking through the nihilistic ‘capitalist realism’ of recent years. In this chapter, Anthony lays bare the divisions within the current Tory party, demonstrating how “four characters [Cameron, Osborne, Gove, Johnson] who have known each other intimately over decades of friendship, rivalry and entitlement, [now] dominate the battle over Britain”. What follows is a rich historical exposition. He attempts to strip away the simplicities of slogans like “take back control” and “safer, more secure” and also dismisses the snide shallowness of seeing the referendum as a merely a vehicle for settling of scores. Instead, he describes the conflict as a bleak clash:
"between the Cameron-Osborne camp who want an arms-length membership, allowing the UK to use the EU as a platform to serve Britain’s self-interest, and Gove-Johnson who argue Britain will do better without the hand of Europe on its shoulder. It is a narrow argument about how to best secure the least influence of the EU while maximizing the UK’s economic advantage."
