Michael Clifford: No going back for new British project

Brexit must happen if England is to have any chance of pulling itself together, writes Michael Clifford

Some things stay with you. On a visit earlier this week to the UK to cover the general election campaign, I found myself in Green Street tube station, central London.

Thirty-four years ago, that station was my first encounter with the London Underground.

It was early on a Saturday morning. Slattery’s Bus — which ferried thousands across the Irish Sea in those days — had deposited me in Paddington, and I was in Green Street waiting to catch a tube to the Irish suburb of Willesden, where friends had already landed.

The platform was deserted but for me and a woman who had all the appearance of a creature of the night.

Next thing, a surge of wind blew down the tunnel, a distant rattle and then lights, and suddenly the train roared up next to the platform, doors clicking and swishing open.

To arrive in London as a teenager in 1985 was to experience a form of time travel. At home, a deep recession had turned the skies grey. The power of the Church was on the wane, but it still felt oppressive.

Difficult as it might be to comprehend today, a basic right such as divorce was illegal and would remain so for another decade.

Society was still insular. Killing in the name of politics was an almost daily occurrence.

Emigration was a major issue. Ireland had coughed out its unwanted for generations, but at least those leaving in their droves in the 1980s were, to a large extent, educated.

My first job that summer was working in the yard of a concrete depot in King’s Cross with a man who’d taken the boat over in the early 60s.

He wore hard years on his leathery face. We ate in a shed at the back of the yard that reeked of cigarettes and dampness and strong tea.

In there, he told me of his admiration for Margaret Thatcher, who had cut taxes and encouraged the likes of him to work even harder.

I was shocked. At home, Thatcher’s approach to the North had her regarded as the devil incarnate and here was an Irishman singing her praises.

Thirty-four years later, in the midst of a general election campaign, different impressions abound.

The UK, or more specifically England, at times appears as if it’s having a nervous breakdown.

Sure, London remains a glamorous and wealthy international city. But out beyond the city, problems have mounted up.

Inequality was an engine of sorts that drove the Thatcher project.

The gap between rich and poor widened over the two decades after she departed.

The gap widened further after the economic crash, which was, to a large extent, the end result of the deregulation and globalisation that Thatcher was instrumental in introducing.

In the north, the old industries were shut down or migrated to eastern Europe.

Many of the formerly steady and prosperous towns and cities are now riven with insecurity.

The ties to the Labour party in working class communities were tight and unbreakable back in the 1980s.

They are now loosened and being hacked free by other political parties.

The solution being proposed for this malaise, and the focus of the general election, is that crazy big thing called Brexit. England — and it is England rather than the UK — is now transfixed by an objective that is essentially an article of faith. Just as religion had a hold over a large segment of the people in this country for generations, so Brexit has with the armies of the disillusioned in England.

They believe in the one, true Brexit. They want their old country back, where there were secure jobs and Englishness could be easily defined.

They want to be freed from the shackles in which Europe has them bound up. It’s as if they have stumbled across the answer to all their woes. Brexit has become a byword for salvation. Believe and we will be great again.

Talking to people in England, and in its north in particular, they are both sick to the teeth of Brexit but adamant that it must go ahead.

What also arises is the fact that all this investment in the promise of Brexit only really dates from around the time of the vote. In polling conducted right up to the months prior to the 2016 referendum, leaving the EU was never raised as one of the public’s top five priorities. Yet now it is such a focus that a general election had to be called to effectively solve it.

“Get Brexit Done” is a politically brilliant and utterly fraudulent election slogan that will, in all likelihood, return Boris Johnson to Number 10.

Apart from the true believers, there is another constituency who are drifting into the church of Brexit.

I spoke to a number of people who said they voted to remain but now feel, in a very English way, that it is only right and honourable to respect the outcome of the referendum.

This despite the widespread knowledge that the referendum campaign was built on lies.

Then there is the shrinking cohort who still pine to stay within Europe. The case they make is based on facts.

They patiently attempt to reason with their opponents.

But the remainers are out of time. They don’t seem to realise that the whole Brexit project is based on the triumph of emotion over reason.

In such an environment, vacuous slogans and propaganda posing as news trounce facts. A good slogan for this election might be: “It’s not the economy, stupid.”

For those reasons there is no going back now.

Brexit must happen if England is to have any chance of pulling itself together and retaking its place among the sane nations of the earth.

The fall-out won’t be evident for a while, and when the penny finally drops, room will be made to blame somebody else.

The abiding hope is that it can be something like a Brexit in name only in which close ties are maintained with the EU.

Meanwhile, what of that other country that seemed so backward 34 years ago?

Major problems persist here, but they are the problems of prosperity.

Ireland has sprinted from an insular state cowed by the crozier to an open society that has — so far — avoided the worst excesses of nationalism and populism breaking out across the world.

Another memory from that first visit across the Irish Sea was a sense of shame I felt anytime the tube was delayed for a bomb scare, or the headlines which spoke of the violent death of another young lad who in all likelihood joined the British army to escape poverty.

This time around, two people in separate places apologised to me for what Brexit is doing to the Irish. Changed times.