For Christmas, I took delivery of a puppy. It was chosen in November and the kids wanted to call it Bender, after the robot in the Simpsons-stable cartoon Futurama. I said that even if we didn’t live in the gay village of Vauxhall, I wouldn’t have a dog called Bender. “Why not?” my son asked. I explained that because as well as being a robot, Bender is a derogatory word meaning homosexual. “You’re homophobic,” he said, to which I replied: “I’m not homophobic, but other people are.” “So, why do you care?” he said.
At which point I dropped arguing in favour of democracy, and suggested we all put a name into a hat, giving each of us one right of veto. I’d forgotten that there were three of them and only two of us, so after all our vetoes were deployed, the dog was still called Bender. So I did what any normal person would do: moved the goalposts and said the dog had to keep the name his first family had given him, otherwise he’d get confused. That name was Romeo, which we could all live with. Unfortunately I’d also forgotten that my daughter is called Harper, so now it looks like we have an unholy obsession with the Beckham family. The first person to notice that laughed for approximately 45 minutes.
We weren’t even out of 2016 and I had already forgotten the first two laws of Brexit: just because a decision is very important doesn’t mean democracy will deliver the right answer; and once the wrong course has been embarked upon, positive thinking won’t help – things will be permanently worse for the rest of your life or, in Romeo’s case, 15 years.
At a celebratory party thrown for Nigel Farage, he gave a speech that made me want to go back to bed and not wake up until I’d emigrated: “For those that are here that aren’t particularly happy with what’s happened in 2016, I’ve got some really bad news for you – it’s going to get a bloody sight worse next year.”
It’s hard to see, from a UK point of view, anything happening in 2017 that is as destructive and diminishing as leaving the EU, unless we have another referendum on whether or not to bring back the death penalty. Yet it is likely, indeed almost certain, that 2017 will contain some political misery – either there will be a snap election, and the Labour party will be massacred, and this will be taken as proof not that Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t say enough, but that liberal values have been vanquished, and people who cling on to them need to stop fighting and adjust to a new reality. Alternatively, there won’t be a general election, and we’ll have to watch agape as a prime minister nobody voted for, with a majority you could fit in an UberXL, marches into negotiations of the most profound national consequence, with a plan she will not even divulge to the Queen.
Farage is right, in other words, and this sentence is so alien to my muscle memory, I went through seven typos to get there: those of us who hated 2016 are going to loathe 2017.
However, my next year’s self will have some advantage over this year’s, which is experience. I’m not going to waste any more time, not one more morning, on despair. After the referendum, I spent the whole summer in a limbo of futility, but what’s the point arguing with people who have no respect for facts, who have no consistency, who change their story halfway through (we can be just like Norway, they said, until suddenly Norway was the most outrageous compromise; we can save huge amounts of money by leaving the EU, they said, until suddenly it was the most expensive decision ever, but somehow it was still worth it)? What’s the point engaging on political terrain where a man can call Mexicans rapists and educated people will still vote for him? The fact is, we re-engage because we have to: the alternative would be nihilism, which is not a realistic position to take up late in life. I accept that; I don’t intend to waste any more time figuring that out.
The other way I tried to escape political misery was by persuading myself things weren’t as bad as they seemed; there is cause for optimism on the progressive side, ideas that are starting to come together, groups that are starting to cooperate, allies appearing from unexpected places. But the politicians ascending on a wave of division and hostility are exactly as bad as they seem: Farage as xenophobic, Johnson as self-serving, May as incompetent, Gove as narcissistic. But we will not find common ground by moving closer to any of these post-Brexit victors, we will just make the job of spreading suspicion and narrow-mindedness easier for them.
I never accepted the idea of public opinion as a solid mass that moves as one and arrives at a new view of which it cannot be disabused. Yet I sometimes relaxed into that interpretation – that the people had spoken on immigration, or on the institutions of the EU, and that new reality had to be incorporated. This is simply not the case: people responded to the strongest argument, or rather, the one most trenchantly put.
The only way to beat it is to make a case that is both substantively stronger and relayed with more conviction. Which feeds into my final lesson from 2016, which is to respond to the new normal by asking for more, not less: I don’t just want human, employee, civil and consumer rights protected as we leave the EU and have to build our own frameworks, I want better ones. I don’t just want to protect the welfare state, I want a new concept of security that takes in the realities of modern precariousness. All those problems that Ukip leverages in the generation of anxiety – housing shortages, overstretched public services, low wages – are real: the best solutions will be the ones that sound audaciously distant from the status quo.
So 2016, in its best possible light, looks like the training montage in Rocky, the bit where we lost a few teeth, but learned how to take knocks; 2017 can be where that experience starts to count.
