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How dare you plebs question us experts? This is the cry of Remainers.
2 JULY 2018
it’s not often I say this, but we should be grateful to Gina Miller. Ms Miller is the wealthy businesswoman who says the Brexit vote made her physically sick and who is so barren in the category of self-awareness that she once gave an interview to a fawning New Statesman hack in which she gabbed about the problems facing 21st-century Britain while ‘spread across a velvet sofa’ in a ‘high-ceilinged drawing room’ while her ‘multimillionaire husband’ acted as her bodyguard. So Caligulan! These are the people the left now loves. Anyway, we should nonetheless be grateful to Ms Miller because her latest outburst has really shone a light on what is driving elitist Brexitphobia.
On Friday, Ms Miller and a host of other female members of the great and good – lawyers, professors, peers, the daughters of filthy-rich capitalists, etc – wrote a letter to the Guardian – where else? – in which they opined that women’s rights would collapse post-Brexit. Because before the EU came into existence in 1992 – the year of Wet Wet Wet, John Major and Damien Hirst’s shark, in case you’re one of those people labouring under the illusion that the EU has existed forever – British women basically had no rights, right? It is only thanks to the grey, stale, quite male oligarchy in Brussels that British women were able to shake off the shackles of oppression. What an insult to the generations of British Suffragettes and libbers who spent decades struggling for freedom before the EU was even a glint in the eye of scheming bureaucrats.
Not surprisingly, Miller and Co’s ridiculous letter – long on initials after the signatories’ names, short on facts – caused annoyance. Not least among some of the millions of women who voted for Brexit. Ms Miller, incredulous that such inhabitants of the plebeian sections of society would presume to question her and her friends, all of whom are well-educated and read broadsheet newspapers, fired back at these little people on Twitter. ‘People responding negatively to our letter [regarding] loss of women’s rights post-Brexit know more than the top women signatories?’, she asked. Then she listed some of these ‘top women’. ‘Jessica Simor QC, Caroline Criado-Perez feminist activist, Cherie Blair QC, Helena Kennedy QC, Shona Jolly QC, Susie Courtault rights campaigner…’
We get it, you know a lot of QCs! And QCs count for more than you and me. This is what Miller is saying. She knows this is what she is saying, we know it is what she is saying, so can we cut to the chase here? Ms Miller is really asking, in the tone of a 17th-century monarch, or 19th-century boss, ‘Do you think you know more than me?’. And we should be glad she is, because this Twitter freakout, this rage of a businesswomen who puked over our vote, this listing of people who are better and cleverer than the rest of us, captures the essence of elitist Remoanerism – which is the belief that some people’s political views are worth more than other people’s, and therefore should carry more weight. Autocracy, as some of us might call it. Whatever it is, it isn’t democracy, which is a system in which everyone’s views, regardless of our racial, gender or educational background, are meant to impact equally on the fate of the nation.
Miller’s unguarded snobbery, her probably accidental exposure of her belief that lesser citizens should stop criticising people with letters after their names, confirms what lies behind Remoaners’ deification of expertise. It is a belief, as old as politics itself, that the well-educated and well brought-up are better placed to make political judgements than the rest of us. Right from Plato’s ‘Philosopher Kings’ to the complaint that was made about women demanding the vote in the late 19th century – as one misogynist politician put it, women ‘lack the expertise… which is necessary for informed political activity’ – there has always been this idea that some people, us, are better at thinking and deciding and doing politics than other people: them. You know them: the kind of folks who vote for Brexit or who outrageously clog up Ms Miller’s Twitterfeed with – brace yourselves – negative comments.
This is the tyranny of expertise. This is the thing Michael Gove was dead right about – and you could tell he was dead right because his comments sent the chattering classes into a political tailspin – when he said people have ‘had enough of experts’. This public bristling against the elevation of expertise in political and social matters isn’t philistinism, as the elitists claim it is, and nor is it a folk-wisdom that prefers the diagnosis of a witch doctor over the insights of Western science. Rather, it is part of a great and democratic growing discomfort with the way in which the beatification of experts grates against the ideal of ‘one person, one vote’ by suggesting, or outright arguing, that some people and some groups should have more say than us.
The populist revolt against experts is a wonderful and positive moment in British politics. This is people saying, ‘Our views count as much as yours. When it comes to politics, our say is absolutely equal to your say, even if we might be poorer than you and have fewer PhDs’. This is in keeping with virtually every stab for the expansion of democracy in history, all of which have relied upon a scepticism about elevated expertise and a conviction that ordinary working people have just as much to contribute to political debate as lords and ladies and business owners do.
In fact, I’d go further: in answer to the question Miller is really asking – which is, ‘Do you lot think you know better than us?’ – we should say ‘Yes’. Yes, by dint of the fact that ordinary people really live in society in a way that bureaucrats and businesspeople often don’t, and therefore are very often more sensitive and alert and thoughtful about the difficulties facing that society, they know more than you. They are better than you at making long-term political decisions that will benefit everyone. They are more politically trustworthy than those who have vested interests, narrow experiences, and a sometimes jaundiced view of society and its inhabitants. But don’t worry, we are democrats, which means we won’t let the fact that ordinary people are better placed than the elites to make sensible political decisions get in the way of your rights. So you’ll still have a vote. That’s all, though. One vote. Like the rest of us.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.
2 JULY 2018
it’s not often I say this, but we should be grateful to Gina Miller. Ms Miller is the wealthy businesswoman who says the Brexit vote made her physically sick and who is so barren in the category of self-awareness that she once gave an interview to a fawning New Statesman hack in which she gabbed about the problems facing 21st-century Britain while ‘spread across a velvet sofa’ in a ‘high-ceilinged drawing room’ while her ‘multimillionaire husband’ acted as her bodyguard. So Caligulan! These are the people the left now loves. Anyway, we should nonetheless be grateful to Ms Miller because her latest outburst has really shone a light on what is driving elitist Brexitphobia.
On Friday, Ms Miller and a host of other female members of the great and good – lawyers, professors, peers, the daughters of filthy-rich capitalists, etc – wrote a letter to the Guardian – where else? – in which they opined that women’s rights would collapse post-Brexit. Because before the EU came into existence in 1992 – the year of Wet Wet Wet, John Major and Damien Hirst’s shark, in case you’re one of those people labouring under the illusion that the EU has existed forever – British women basically had no rights, right? It is only thanks to the grey, stale, quite male oligarchy in Brussels that British women were able to shake off the shackles of oppression. What an insult to the generations of British Suffragettes and libbers who spent decades struggling for freedom before the EU was even a glint in the eye of scheming bureaucrats.
Not surprisingly, Miller and Co’s ridiculous letter – long on initials after the signatories’ names, short on facts – caused annoyance. Not least among some of the millions of women who voted for Brexit. Ms Miller, incredulous that such inhabitants of the plebeian sections of society would presume to question her and her friends, all of whom are well-educated and read broadsheet newspapers, fired back at these little people on Twitter. ‘People responding negatively to our letter [regarding] loss of women’s rights post-Brexit know more than the top women signatories?’, she asked. Then she listed some of these ‘top women’. ‘Jessica Simor QC, Caroline Criado-Perez feminist activist, Cherie Blair QC, Helena Kennedy QC, Shona Jolly QC, Susie Courtault rights campaigner…’
We get it, you know a lot of QCs! And QCs count for more than you and me. This is what Miller is saying. She knows this is what she is saying, we know it is what she is saying, so can we cut to the chase here? Ms Miller is really asking, in the tone of a 17th-century monarch, or 19th-century boss, ‘Do you think you know more than me?’. And we should be glad she is, because this Twitter freakout, this rage of a businesswomen who puked over our vote, this listing of people who are better and cleverer than the rest of us, captures the essence of elitist Remoanerism – which is the belief that some people’s political views are worth more than other people’s, and therefore should carry more weight. Autocracy, as some of us might call it. Whatever it is, it isn’t democracy, which is a system in which everyone’s views, regardless of our racial, gender or educational background, are meant to impact equally on the fate of the nation.
Miller’s unguarded snobbery, her probably accidental exposure of her belief that lesser citizens should stop criticising people with letters after their names, confirms what lies behind Remoaners’ deification of expertise. It is a belief, as old as politics itself, that the well-educated and well brought-up are better placed to make political judgements than the rest of us. Right from Plato’s ‘Philosopher Kings’ to the complaint that was made about women demanding the vote in the late 19th century – as one misogynist politician put it, women ‘lack the expertise… which is necessary for informed political activity’ – there has always been this idea that some people, us, are better at thinking and deciding and doing politics than other people: them. You know them: the kind of folks who vote for Brexit or who outrageously clog up Ms Miller’s Twitterfeed with – brace yourselves – negative comments.
This is the tyranny of expertise. This is the thing Michael Gove was dead right about – and you could tell he was dead right because his comments sent the chattering classes into a political tailspin – when he said people have ‘had enough of experts’. This public bristling against the elevation of expertise in political and social matters isn’t philistinism, as the elitists claim it is, and nor is it a folk-wisdom that prefers the diagnosis of a witch doctor over the insights of Western science. Rather, it is part of a great and democratic growing discomfort with the way in which the beatification of experts grates against the ideal of ‘one person, one vote’ by suggesting, or outright arguing, that some people and some groups should have more say than us.
The populist revolt against experts is a wonderful and positive moment in British politics. This is people saying, ‘Our views count as much as yours. When it comes to politics, our say is absolutely equal to your say, even if we might be poorer than you and have fewer PhDs’. This is in keeping with virtually every stab for the expansion of democracy in history, all of which have relied upon a scepticism about elevated expertise and a conviction that ordinary working people have just as much to contribute to political debate as lords and ladies and business owners do.
In fact, I’d go further: in answer to the question Miller is really asking – which is, ‘Do you lot think you know better than us?’ – we should say ‘Yes’. Yes, by dint of the fact that ordinary people really live in society in a way that bureaucrats and businesspeople often don’t, and therefore are very often more sensitive and alert and thoughtful about the difficulties facing that society, they know more than you. They are better than you at making long-term political decisions that will benefit everyone. They are more politically trustworthy than those who have vested interests, narrow experiences, and a sometimes jaundiced view of society and its inhabitants. But don’t worry, we are democrats, which means we won’t let the fact that ordinary people are better placed than the elites to make sensible political decisions get in the way of your rights. So you’ll still have a vote. That’s all, though. One vote. Like the rest of us.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked.
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I doubt she would know much about that history of Britain would she.
A group of women expressing their own opinion and that opinion being anti-brexit.
Jesus, the lads at Spiked must have been like vultures on a carcass fighting to get at that one.
Jesus, the lads at Spiked must have been like vultures on a carcass fighting to get at that one.
pineapple has misunderstood what the article is saying , no surprise really
May’s problem: Brexit and Trumpism have become monstrous twins
Rafael Behr
Her EU negotiations are hampered by the Brexiteers around her who laud a White House set on wrecking Europe
So quickly has the unthinkable become unremarkable. US presidents never used to conspire to undermine European security. Nowadays it is normal. We learned last week that, when Emmanuel Macron was a guest in the White House in April, Donald Trump suggested France leave the European Union. And it hardly makes the top 20 Trumpian outrages of the year so far.
It isn’t news that Trump despises the EU. His primary grievance is economic: the US imports too many European goods (German cars, for instance). He believes that the strong sell to the weak, and thus a trade deficit is a symptom of national enfeeblement and a shame to be extirpated. So he launched a tariff war with Brussels. But that is a symptom of a more profound cognitive impairment. The president struggles with concepts of reciprocity and solidarity. His is a zero-sum universe in which benefits enjoyed by anyone else must have been deducted from his portion.
He also knows no history. He does not recognise the underlying ethos of the EU, conceived in the ashes of 20th-century apocalypse, binding formerly antagonistic states into mutual economic obligations. The very idea belongs to a dimension that Trump’s mind cannot visit. No wonder he likes Brexit.
It would be naive to imagine the present-day EU as a perfect realisation of its founding promise. And there is no available counterfactual to show how much poorer and less secure its members might be had their union never evolved. Still, its rise has generally tracked trends of unprecedented peace and prosperity, so it is rational to be afraid when the White House agitates for the whole thing to unravel.
Doubling pro-Europeans’ anxiety is the thought of Angela Merkel reaching her political twilight. The German chancellor is in her 13th year in office. She stands on the continental stage as an ambassador from the past and keeper of its lessons. Her childhood was spent in an authoritarian communist republic that was dissolved in 1990. Her career is a tribute to the merit in tearing down walls.
But her coalition government is fragile. The moderate, liberal consensus it upholds, and of which she has come to be an embodiment, looks haggard and defensive. The Europe that Merkel represents is besieged by populists and nationalists. The trend manifests itself in varied forms from country to country. The new maverick Italian strain is different to the entrenched Polish and Hungarian versions. But a common thread is venomous anti-immigration rhetoric in harmony with the Trump agenda. Richard Grenell, Washington’s ambassador to Berlin, recently gave an interview to Breitbart, the hard-right propaganda outlet, in which he described an ambition to “empower” disruptive movements spreading conservative dissent across the continent.
Consider what embattled European liberals make of Brexit in this context. It is admired by a US president who wishes misfortune on them; and that president is admired by Tory politicians who speak of Brussels as if it were a mortal enemy. From across the Channel, Trump and Brexit look like monstrous conjoined electoral twins, born a few months apart in 2016, both conceived in hostility to prevailing norms of global governance.
Theresa May understands this, and has tried to rebrand Brexit as something Europe-friendly. When speaking with an eye on her continental audience, she emphasises shared history and values. She talks of an enduring, close partnership. She believes it, too. The only significant intervention she made for the remain campaign in 2016 was a speech explaining how an alliance of western democracies amplified the UK’s power in the world. “The European Union does make us more secure, it does make us more prosperous and it does make us more influential beyond our shores,” May said.
One of the crippling delusions that fogged Brexiter judgment at the start of the article 50 process was a belief that individual national interests of the 27 other member states could be gamed to the UK’s advantage: that while the commission was formally in charge of the negotiations, there would come a point when old-fashioned bilateral bargaining could take over. Then the mythical “bespoke” deal – stitched from scraps of old treaty to fit around Britain’s economy – would be available. It hasn’t happened, and Trump is a large part of the reason. His marauding presence on the global stage enhances the value in European community and casts Brexit as its antithesis.
For every effort the prime minister makes to explain that Britain still wants to uphold the rules-based international order, there are a dozen times her cabinet, her party, and the whole frenzied Brexit-boosting carnival proves the opposite. There is Boris Johnson, fantasising aloud how much better Trump would be at handling the negotiations. There are reports that John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, held private talks with hardline pro-Brexit MPs behind May’s back. And these are the alt-right Tories who stalk the prime minister, daggers half-drawn, signalling that their revolution will be completed either by her or over her political corpse.
How is the EU supposed to accommodate a country whose leader claims to support its project but whose ruling party fizzes with excitement at the prospect of an epoch-shaking schism? How is Merkel or Macron to understand May’s ambition for a “deep and special partnership” when they can see the wreckers over her shoulder; when her friendly words are drowned out by drums that beat in perfect time with sworn enemies of Europe’s founding idea?
The prime minister has ducked many choices since the negotiations to leave the EU began, and avoided many hard questions. But they all flow from one strategic call; one irreducible Brexit dilemma. Our most valuable allies see their problem as the unravelling of European solidarity. Britain has to decide whether it is serious about being part of the solution.
Rafael Behr
Her EU negotiations are hampered by the Brexiteers around her who laud a White House set on wrecking Europe
So quickly has the unthinkable become unremarkable. US presidents never used to conspire to undermine European security. Nowadays it is normal. We learned last week that, when Emmanuel Macron was a guest in the White House in April, Donald Trump suggested France leave the European Union. And it hardly makes the top 20 Trumpian outrages of the year so far.
It isn’t news that Trump despises the EU. His primary grievance is economic: the US imports too many European goods (German cars, for instance). He believes that the strong sell to the weak, and thus a trade deficit is a symptom of national enfeeblement and a shame to be extirpated. So he launched a tariff war with Brussels. But that is a symptom of a more profound cognitive impairment. The president struggles with concepts of reciprocity and solidarity. His is a zero-sum universe in which benefits enjoyed by anyone else must have been deducted from his portion.
He also knows no history. He does not recognise the underlying ethos of the EU, conceived in the ashes of 20th-century apocalypse, binding formerly antagonistic states into mutual economic obligations. The very idea belongs to a dimension that Trump’s mind cannot visit. No wonder he likes Brexit.
It would be naive to imagine the present-day EU as a perfect realisation of its founding promise. And there is no available counterfactual to show how much poorer and less secure its members might be had their union never evolved. Still, its rise has generally tracked trends of unprecedented peace and prosperity, so it is rational to be afraid when the White House agitates for the whole thing to unravel.
Doubling pro-Europeans’ anxiety is the thought of Angela Merkel reaching her political twilight. The German chancellor is in her 13th year in office. She stands on the continental stage as an ambassador from the past and keeper of its lessons. Her childhood was spent in an authoritarian communist republic that was dissolved in 1990. Her career is a tribute to the merit in tearing down walls.
But her coalition government is fragile. The moderate, liberal consensus it upholds, and of which she has come to be an embodiment, looks haggard and defensive. The Europe that Merkel represents is besieged by populists and nationalists. The trend manifests itself in varied forms from country to country. The new maverick Italian strain is different to the entrenched Polish and Hungarian versions. But a common thread is venomous anti-immigration rhetoric in harmony with the Trump agenda. Richard Grenell, Washington’s ambassador to Berlin, recently gave an interview to Breitbart, the hard-right propaganda outlet, in which he described an ambition to “empower” disruptive movements spreading conservative dissent across the continent.
Consider what embattled European liberals make of Brexit in this context. It is admired by a US president who wishes misfortune on them; and that president is admired by Tory politicians who speak of Brussels as if it were a mortal enemy. From across the Channel, Trump and Brexit look like monstrous conjoined electoral twins, born a few months apart in 2016, both conceived in hostility to prevailing norms of global governance.
Theresa May understands this, and has tried to rebrand Brexit as something Europe-friendly. When speaking with an eye on her continental audience, she emphasises shared history and values. She talks of an enduring, close partnership. She believes it, too. The only significant intervention she made for the remain campaign in 2016 was a speech explaining how an alliance of western democracies amplified the UK’s power in the world. “The European Union does make us more secure, it does make us more prosperous and it does make us more influential beyond our shores,” May said.
One of the crippling delusions that fogged Brexiter judgment at the start of the article 50 process was a belief that individual national interests of the 27 other member states could be gamed to the UK’s advantage: that while the commission was formally in charge of the negotiations, there would come a point when old-fashioned bilateral bargaining could take over. Then the mythical “bespoke” deal – stitched from scraps of old treaty to fit around Britain’s economy – would be available. It hasn’t happened, and Trump is a large part of the reason. His marauding presence on the global stage enhances the value in European community and casts Brexit as its antithesis.
For every effort the prime minister makes to explain that Britain still wants to uphold the rules-based international order, there are a dozen times her cabinet, her party, and the whole frenzied Brexit-boosting carnival proves the opposite. There is Boris Johnson, fantasising aloud how much better Trump would be at handling the negotiations. There are reports that John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser, held private talks with hardline pro-Brexit MPs behind May’s back. And these are the alt-right Tories who stalk the prime minister, daggers half-drawn, signalling that their revolution will be completed either by her or over her political corpse.
How is the EU supposed to accommodate a country whose leader claims to support its project but whose ruling party fizzes with excitement at the prospect of an epoch-shaking schism? How is Merkel or Macron to understand May’s ambition for a “deep and special partnership” when they can see the wreckers over her shoulder; when her friendly words are drowned out by drums that beat in perfect time with sworn enemies of Europe’s founding idea?
The prime minister has ducked many choices since the negotiations to leave the EU began, and avoided many hard questions. But they all flow from one strategic call; one irreducible Brexit dilemma. Our most valuable allies see their problem as the unravelling of European solidarity. Britain has to decide whether it is serious about being part of the solution.
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