The Breakup of Britain: on Fintan O'Toole's Heroic Failure

This is a part of a review I wrote for Willett's Mag. 

Oliver’s army is here to stay

Oliver’s army are on their way

And I would rather be anywhere else

But here today – Elvis Costello

In 2009, I became a great fan of Fintan O’Toole’s column in the Irish Times, where he served as an appalled guide to the meltdown of the Irish banks, which were riding down the sudden and traumatic slump in real estate prices. O’Toole was full of savage indignation at the sheer wanton and meanminded greed of it all, and it was a thrill to see him unloose the vials of his wrath on incompetent government honchos, the party of Fianna Fáil, the popinjay plutocrats, and their collaborators, a gang of looters pathetically incapable of covering their tracks. I was rooting from the far seats, ’cause I knew that the fight in Ireland was the same as the fight in the U.S. and the EU – the fight of the working people against the rip off artists who rule them. At the same time, O’Toole was funny. Funny! Righteous and funny is a hard combo to pull off, and requires a deal of literary reference. All of these are qualities I revere. As well, he didn’t turn out to be a reactionary crank (many were the critics of the banksters who turned out to be supporters of something even worse), but, recognizably, a democratic socialist type, or social democrat type, whatever.  Which I, a lukewarm Marxist, think is the best we’ll get in my lifetime.

In some of the reviews of Heroic Failure – especially those written by conservatives – O’Toole is accused of an uncritical, admiring attitude towards the EU. This is of course not true. As he wrote in a recent column:

… the other way to be [a] bad European is obsequiousness to the demands of the technocratic elites in Brussels and Frankfort. If the EU in not a community of vibrant, challenging, skeptical democracies, it will wither. The meek will inherit nothing.

I could do some picking at the idea that France, Italy, Hungary or Poland have vibrant democracies at the moment – but you get the drift. With this viewpoint, O’Toole is a natural Remainer, but no EU soft soaper.  More than that – what his conservative critics miss, flailing away at the fun he has at their expense – is that his analysis, which concentrates on the social forces behind the Leave position, concedes to Leave a dialectical complexity that lifts the book out of the zone of mere denunciation. This is an exemplary study of the culture, or part of the culture, of contemporary England – the England that is confusedly starting to address its identity as the British nation-state complex breaks up. Its is a comparatively fast decline-and-fall, taking not hundreds of years but decades. And we are in the midst of it.