Albion's wrenching choice

Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO makes some interesting sociocultural observations on the tensions in his native Britain over today's Brexit vote.

Almost all of my more cosmopolitan friends are for Britain’s staying in, and, when I express the opposite view, have a tendency to condescend. “Really?” they ask, eyebrows raised. “Really?” And then, their irritation rising, they look at me with a sort of detached fascination, as if I had just suggested putting erotically shaped ice cubes into the Pinot Noir. One woman, who has been a friend since we were both eleven, told me over coffee that I should reconsider my position because “all the smart people” are pro-Remain. Another, an extremely sharp pediatrician whom I would trust with my life, has been berating her pro-Brexit siblings for “canceling out” the “sensible votes” that she and her husband hope to cast. The charges of smugness, it seems, have not been overblown.

Nor, I notice, have the reports of reticence from the other side. Perhaps because they are expecting precisely the reaction I got, the Leavers of my acquaintance tend to start their explanations with an apology. “I’m sorry,” they say, “but . . . ”; “I just think that . . . ”; “I understand that this is tricky, however . . . ” Such is the cultural power of the BBC and the political class — both of which have done their level best to make Brexit seem outré — that some people I speak to pretend that they are on the fence when they are clearly not, and relax only when I volunteer that I’m pro-leaving and have been for as long as I remember. “Oh,” they say with a furtive look around, “well in that case.”

On the train from Huntingdon to London, I see these divisions in full bloom. Almost everyone is reading a newspaper — it feels a little as if I’ve stepped backwards in time, to the 1950s — and their choices betray their politics. Running my eyes across the carriage, I feel as if I am attending a bizarre, hyper-ecumenical protest march, at which anybody with a strong, 40-point-font opinion is welcome. From seat level, the front pages resemble low-slung protest signs: “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” “Remain!” “Leave!” It is possible, I suppose, that the people sitting behind these slogans are less sure of their views than it appears, but you certainly wouldn’t know it from their conversations with each other, full as they are of hard-headed assurances and mild exasperation at any expression of dissent. The phrase, “no, but you see” is used a lot, along with the insistence — repeated as if by rote and used by both sides — that “they are just trying to scare you.” On the surface it is all very polite, as Britons typically are. But there is an edge this time — an edge I haven’t seen for a long time.

He cautions against making demographic assumptions about who is for and against:

As one might expect, the rural area from which I hail is adamantly pro-Leave — around my village you see nothing but anti-EU signs; anything else would be treason — but so are swathes of the industrial North and the urban midlands: places in which voters wouldn’t return a conservative if their lives depended on it.

Of course, post-American Squirrel-Hair-bots would no doubt rush to proclaim an outburst of "nationalism" all over the West, and I suppose there's a kernel of truth in such spin. I think there's something very English - and therefore something of the finest of a Western sentiment - about a deep sense of keeping things as local as possible, right down to personal sovereignty. It is the thread of continuity that has informed such developments as the Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and our own Revolution here in what was at the time the United States of America.

There is something in a naturally developed human being that does not cotton to pointy-headed bureaucrats in distant places making key decisions that ought to be one's own to make.