Home > Author > Fintan O'Toole
1 " In a double-page spread in 1999, the Daily Mail ran a large photo of fake Nazis from ’Allo ’Allo! with a think-piece headlined ‘In the week that Germany kept the old feud alive by illegally banning British beef: Why it’s a good thing for us to be beastly to the Germans.’ It was written, not by some hack but by the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson. He found a way to argue both that the ‘war’ with Germany was entirely phoney and that it was nonetheless worth continuing because it was somehow in Europe’s best interests. While conceding ‘The reality is that we have more in common with the Germans than with any other European people’, Ferguson managed to conclude that ‘bad Anglo-German relations were (paradoxically) a good thing. To be precise: it would really be rather bad for everyone else in Europe if Britain and Germany did strike up a firm alliance. "
― Fintan O'Toole , Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
2 " This is one possible answer to the deflationary sensation so perfectly captured in a question mark in Jane Gardam’s novel of the dissolution of the Raj, Old Filth: ‘When empires end, there’s often a dazzling finale – then—?’31 Well, perhaps empires don’t quite end when you think they do. Perhaps they have a final moment of zombie existence. This may be the last stage of imperialism – having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed. "
3 " Why, then, were there no photographs of Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl holding hands at the Brandenburg Gate to match the pictures of Kohl and François Mitterrand at Verdun in 1984? Because Thatcher literally carried in her handbag maps showing German expansion under the Nazis.4 This was a mental cartography that English conservatism could not transcend – the map of a Europe that may no longer exist in reality but within which its imagination remains imprisoned. ‘Europe,’ Barnett writes, ‘moved on from the Second World War and Britain didn’t.’ One might go so far as to say that England never got over winning the war. "
4 " Even as a game of chance, however, Brexit is especially odd. It is a surreal casino in which the high-rollers are playing for pennies at the blackjack tables while the plebs are stuffing their life savings into the slot machines. For those who can afford risk, there is very little on the table; for those who cannot, entire livelihoods are at stake. The backbench anti-Brexit Tory MP Anna Soubry rose to her feet in the Commons in July 2018, eyed her Brexiteer colleagues and let fly: ‘Nobody voted to be poorer, and nobody voted Leave on the basis that somebody with a gold-plated pension and inherited wealth would take their jobs away from them.’ But if that’s not what people voted for, it is emphatically what they got: if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way. "
5 " This may be the last stage of imperialism–having appropriated everything else from its colonies, the dead empire appropriates the pain of those it has oppressed. "
6 " Her decision to do so – when she had a working majority in Parliament – was not pure vanity. It was the inevitable result of the völkisch rhetoric she had adopted when she told her first Tory Party conference as leader that ‘if you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’, openly evoking the far-right (and Stalinist) trope of ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ who did not deserve citizenship. "
7 " As he confessed in 2002, ‘Some of my most joyous hours have been spent in a state of semi-incoherence, composing foam-flecked hymns of hate to the latest Euro-infamy: the ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp.’20 The fact that there was no ban on the prawn cocktail flavour crisp (it is still freely available over the counter) was no impediment to the foam-flecked hymns of hate. On the contrary, being pure fiction made the story beautifully elastic. Like the tale of Marina’s toast, this tiny seed of grievance could blossom into a monstrous oppression. "
8 " His second expedition in 1845 was deeply Brexitlike. As Barczewski explains, it was undertaken in a spirit of blithe optimism: ‘Nothing could be simpler. But the plan ignored the fact that 500 miles (800 km) of the voyage were unmapped, meaning that the actual distance that a ship needed to travel might prove much longer as it picked its way through ice and the Arctic archipelago. This had not mattered in the imaginations of the journey’s planners.’4 If this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has watched the course of Brexit’s voyage from ‘nothing could be simpler’ to getting lost in unmapped wastelands, it may be because the same attitudes have been at work. "
9 " An Englishman will burn his bed to catch a flea’ – TURKISH PROVERB "
10 " you’ve thrilled yourself with these dark imaginings you end with the ultimate in wish-fulfilment: the EU is a front for a German cabal and this will save Brexit. It is hard to overstate the extent to which Brexit depended on the idea of who really runs the EU: German car manufacturers. For some of those at the top of the Labour Party, the idea of the EU as a mere front for the bosses and moguls of Europe was a reason to be secretly pleased that Brexit would allow Britain to escape their clutches and build socialism in one country. "
11 " This desire to experience the vicarious thrills of humiliation is possible only in a country that did not know what national humiliation is really like. But the problem with wish-fulfilment is that your wishes might end up being fulfilled. In the Brexit negotiations, the idea of national humiliation moved from fiction to reality. There was a strange ecstasy of shame: ‘Britain faces a terrible choice: between the humiliation of a deal dictated by Brussels; and the chaos of crashing out of the EU "
12 " The Irish Times ran an editorial in 1956, full of dark intimations that the Irish would become like other indigenous peoples who had lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival: ‘What matters is that we will disappear as a composite race. We will add our name or names to those of the races that assimilate us; but as an entity, we will cease to exist.’32 "
― Fintan O'Toole , We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland
13 " As Wheen has pointed out, ‘In the twenty years between 1950 and 1970… a state of emergency had been declared only twice, for the national rail strike of 1955 and the seamen’s strike of 1966. During Ted Heath’s brief and calamitous premiership, between June 1970 and February 1974, he declared no fewer than five.’27 Thus, on either side of the momentous decision to join the European project, Britain was in crisis mode. These five national emergencies may have planted the seeds of one of the tropes that would surface in the coming decades and flower in Brexit: the idea that Britain was, in some way, still at war. "
14 " The inflation of language is striking. Exotic flavours of crisps are suddenly part of ‘Britain’s heritage’, on a par with Stonehenge, Shakespeare and the six wives of Henry VIII. The German nationality of the commissioner Martin Bangemann allows the story to become another episode of Anglo-German conflict (‘der crunch’) – like two world wars. And in Taylor’s rent-a-quote comment, there is a double act of hyping. A packet of crisps becomes a thing that ‘affects your life’, and the alleged assault on the right to produce and consume it in strange varieties is the demolition of democracy. There is no point in voting at all because some bloke in Brussels will just decide what you can and cannot eat. "
15 " For reasons that may puzzle anthropologists long into the future, the prawn cocktail – a few (hopefully unfrozen) crustaceans placed in a glass on a bed of shredded lettuce, smothered in a pink Marie Rose sauce and sprinkled with paprika had become the quintessential English idea of fine dining. "
16 " dignified, decent, democratic settlement that allowed the natural warmth of a neighbourly relationship to come fully to the surface. "
― Fintan O'Toole , Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles
17 " This mentality is by no means exclusive to the Right. There is a long leftist tradition of seeing continental slavishness as a threat to English liberty, and of imagining England as the only green and pleasant land in which the new Jerusalem could be built. "
18 " Yet the idea of American investment was potent. To open the Irish economy up so that British bosses could employ Irish workers was to admit defeat. To have American firms in small Irish towns would be to embrace a thrilling modernity and simultaneously to reconnect with the great Irish-American diaspora in whom so much hope – from tourist dollars to support for the national cause of ending partition – had been invested "
19 " There were many factors at work, but the proximate cause was undoubtedly the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. In part, the new English nationalism is thus another example of the dominant power mimicking the gestures of small-nation ‘liberation’ movements – the English were reacting to and mirroring the emergence of a potent and effective Scottish nationalism. "
20 " the uncensorable power of the simplest form of private literature: the letter home. "
