New Reads - Part 1

Over the holiday period, I have been reading loads of books, and I'll share my thoughts on some of them. #christmasreads

Firstly, Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain by Fintan O'Toole.  Sometimes it takes an Irishman to explain Brexit to the British, but mostly to the English psyche. Self-pity is at the heart of it all.

Some quotes from the book...

“Heroic failure was an exercise in transference. The British needed to fill a yawning gap between their self-image as exemplars of liberty and civility and the violence and domination that were the realities of Empire.”

“The somewhat despairing question that Bill Grundy asked in his notorious Sex Pistols TV interview – ‘Are you serious or are you just… trying to make me laugh?’ – hangs over Johnson’s entire political and journalistic career.”

“At stake here is an idea of sovereignty. It is the great appeal of Brexit: we are re-establishing our sovereignty, taking it back from Brussels. But it is also the great contradiction: if restoring sovereignty to Westminster and the British courts is the point of the exercise, why does the rhetoric of Brexit so quickly resolve itself into hysterical attacks on the exercise of this very sovereignty by Parliament and the Supreme Court?”

“Here we see one of the paradoxes and contradictions of Brexit itself. It is driven by a force – English nationalism – that its leaders still refuse to articulate.”

“England can no longer afford an eccentric ruling class, but this is one area in which deficit spending has gone wild. In characters like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, the old English indulgence of eccentricity has been grafted onto the mass-media cult of celebrity and a broad revolt against colourless identikit career politicians to create an invasive species as tenacious and damaging as Japanese knotweed...... the indulgence of eccentricity brought clownish absurdity and self-centred recklessness into the heart of political power.”

The book is available on Amazon here.