If Brexit is a soap opera, which soap opera is it? It has to be an English one, of course, and not one of your trendy, niche, late-night cleveralities either – whatever else we can say about Brexit, it is a saga for a mass audience. It is daytime TV with wobbly sets, incredible characters and wildly erratic plot lines.
So the shortlist really comes down to two: Crossroads and Emmerdale. These are two long-running soaps that found themselves in deep trouble because the writers had lost the plot and audiences were in equal measure perplexed and bored.
The usual twists to the characters or injections of super-melodramatic storylines wouldn’t do. The show-runners had to resort to drastic measures. Specifically, they had to write their way out of a dead end. Their respective exit strategies give us two very different ways of thinking about the Brexit endgame. It is tempting to imagine a new Brexit referendum in which the question is: do want to be in Crossroads or do you want to be in Emmerdale?
The Emmerdale option is the choice of the hard Leavers: a purifying crash-and-burn as a prelude to a much more thrilling series of "our island story"
Boris Johnson is currently an Emmerdale man. When Emmerdale was in need of an extreme reboot in 1993, the scriptwriters went all apocalyptic. A passing plane exploded in mid-air, conveniently scattering burning wreckage around precise locations in and around the village to incinerate the most boring members of the cast.
Johnson will surely be aware that the disaster didn’t just rejuvenate Emmerdale by freeing it from the shackles of plausibility, it pushed it way up the hierarchy of English soaps. It proved that a willingness to embrace catastrophe could unleash great potential.
English resilience
And the cataclysm became a benchmark of English resilience. In March 2000, after a bus crash, a cheery Emmerdale character said “Well, we have survived a plane crash. I am sure we can survive this” – just as we now hear in the vox pops (and presumably in Dominic Cummings’s focus groups) “We survived the Blitz, I am sure we can survive a no-deal Brexit.”
The Emmerdale option is the choice of the hard Leavers: a purifying crash-and-burn as a prelude to a much more thrilling series of “our island story”.
Crossroads, on the other hand, is the option for the diehard Remainers. With Crossroads, the question was how to put a dying show out of its misery. How could it be brought to a sudden close?
Brexit is not a soap opera. It is admittedly quite a show and, up to a point, entertaining: a camp performance with its own peculiar blend of farce and tragedy
In the final episode in 2003, the owner of the Crossroads hotel, Angel (played by Jane Asher), realises the entire show had all been a reverie – “I’ve just woken up from an amazing dream and dreamt that I owned a hotel called Crossroads.”
She returned to her real-life job as a supermarket checkout assistant in Birmingham called Angela. This is the option favoured by the some Remainers: Brexit was all just a bad dream.
As James Joyce (surely an unacknowledged inspiration for Crossroads) put it: "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." The dark Angel of English nationalism can just rub her eyes and go back to being nice, quiet, smiley Angela on the checkouts. It is June 22nd, 2016, again, and all is right with the world.
Farce and tragedy
So which is it to be, Emmerdale or Crossroads? Wipe out half the village, or pretend it was all just a bad dream?
Neither, of course. Brexit is not a soap opera. It is admittedly quite a show and, up to a point, entertaining: a camp performance with its own peculiar blend of farce and tragedy.
But it is also a profound political, social and economic crisis with multigenerational consequences. It may have gone on for far too long already and viewers may be inclined to switch off, but the scriptwriters can’t just resort to extreme narrative leaps. However tempting the alternative endgames, the thing cannot be escaped. It has to be worked through.
The problem with the Emmerdale scenario is not the obvious one. Apocalypse Now may not sound like a great idea to most people, but to those who fancy it – the hard core of no-deal zealots – Brexit has acquired a quasi-religious quality.
Its true believers are an end-of-the-world cult, waiting for the Rapture. Pain is good: it will wash away the sins of a half-century of shameful submission to Europe. Death is good: it will be followed by the resurrection of England.
The referendum result of June 2016 is not a bad dream. It is history – and history has no reverse gear. It cannot be merely wished away
In this seam of the reactionary imagination, England has only ever really been itself when it has been at war. A return to some version of wartime conditions is not a threat – it is a promise.
So the real problem with the Emmerdale option is not the crash. It is that even the embrace of destruction doesn’t really move the story on. To deepen the agony is merely to prolong it: after the apocalyptic Brextinction comes a Brexternity of new negotiations with the EU. The narrative, after the shock, will become even more tedious.
If you think the withdrawal agreement is dreary, you haven’t even begun to imagine the profound existential ennui of trying to hammer out a trade deal with 27 countries, each of which has a veto.
But the Crossroads solution doesn’t work either. The referendum result of June 2016 is not a bad dream. It is history – and history has no reverse gear. It happened, and while what happened can be revisited, reargued and redressed, it cannot be merely wished away.
A stew of grievances that had long been simmering had a powerful heat put under it. It boiled over and it cannot simply be put back in the pan. Brexit can’t be defeated by decreeing that it was all a moment of madness that occurred during a temporary sleep of reason.
This incoherent revolution demands, not a mere restoration of the ancien regime, but a better revolution, one that radically overhauls the political system, restores public and egalitarian values and convinces people that they really do have a democratic voice.
Brexit has never really been about the EU – indeed, it has exposed a great ignorance about the EU and how it works, not just in the general population but in a large section of the political class.
Deep unhappiness
Brexit is about England and its deep unhappiness with itself. It is certainly a great exercise in displacement and distraction, and Johnson is a master of those tactics. But Johnson can’t be countered without a serious engagement with what is being displaced and what is being distracted from.
There is a deep crisis of belonging and it has many dimensions: economic, social, cultural, national, democratic.
Brexit won’t address any of these problems – indeed, it is much more likely to exacerbate them. But those who want to stop Brexit can’t content themselves with merely pointing this out. They must themselves address that crisis. That can’t be done by simply reviving the tired old show of a dying imperial state. It needs an entirely new series.