It was like one of those New Years Eves where you hadn’t been invited anywhere or, if you had, you couldn’t get a babysitter. So I went to bed on Friday and woke up free of a set of trade agreements. I tried to feel something – anything, really – but nothing had actually happened. Until I looked at the media, of course. I continue to think that, like many things, a good chunk of Brexit is media confection. Most people have lives. Don’t @ me about the chunk that isn’t – the unsettled status of so many.
When I looked at the media, I did feel things – rage, mostly. Sorry, but I don’t want the likes of Ian McEwan complaining he is now one of the “left-behinds”. If any of this was a revolt against the elite, it hasn’t worked. The elites just won’t stop eliting. Let’s ship in Martin Amis to ventriloquise cockneys.
I have had several arguments with my friends, although we are basically on the same side. I don’t want Brexit, but I always thought it inevitable. I don’t like the nostalgia about the 2012 Olympics, either, as the riots the year before are whitewashed away. “I feel European,” they say – but Europe has not gone away. No one says: “I am feeling really EU-ish,” do they? All this has left me bored to tears, even though I did a DNA test and am basically the world.
The hashtag #thick trended on Twitter. If, I wondered, after four years, the thick people won, how thick do you have to be lose?
But then a movement led by white middle-class blokes – the self-appointed leaders of the remain/People’s Vote crew – was as bad as Corbyn agreeing to trigger article 50. Are all these people gonna strop till they drop?
What can people who think Brexit is a terrible mistake do – just hope for failure? Or maybe understand their own, which takes guts? The union-jack waistcoats are as idiotic as the blue and yellow faces. These people could surely find common ground in a dressing-up box.
In this transition period, the accepted political wisdom is that we need an opposition that holds the government to account. Does that mean criticising every move that Boris Johnson makes as he enters the fantasy free-trade nirvana? This is not a strategy. There has to be some attempt at consensus around certain areas.
There has been so much sentimental tosh from both sides, from Auld Lang Syne to projections onto the white cliffs of Dover. All of this has left me cold. You can tell me I am heartless, but as politics is once more happening, pragmatism is called for: around education, the NHS, the devastating cuts to local councils.
We need to go back to finding solutions instead of continuing to yell “Austerity!” or “Brexit!” as though that is policy. The awful politics of purity, which has meant that anyone who thinks anything vaguely different should be “cancelled”, has resulted in what? Ever smaller circles of woke with no ambition to wake any of us caught snoozing.
Populism needs an enemy. The enemy of populism is consensus. It’s a big ask to see another road opening up, but if Brexit is making us smaller then we have to think bigger. We have to keep moving instead of being trapped in regret. As PJ O’Rourke said: “Ideology, politics and journalism, which luxuriate in failure, are impotent in the face of hope and joy.” No one votes for impotence.
That may be counterintuitive right now – but tell me what else to do. Without strategy and hope, the left are becoming the left behinds. And that surely is #reallythick.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
