The last three of these usages are direct quotations of Taleb’s words and the third and fourth are indirect reports of his comments during an interview on the CNBC channel.
This article differs from those from The Mail and The Sun in that Nassim Taleb, and in imitation Nick Gutteridge, portray the EU elite as consisting of individuals who are not particularly cerebral and therefore have not yet understood that the European project in its present form is destined to fail. However, like James Slack and John Longworth, Taleb uses – or is reported as using – the word sneering with reference to how the elite see the rest of us: ‘He said the entire world has grown tired of a sneering elite which has spent the last few decades “patronising the bottom 30 per cent” whilst vastly enriching itself’. Furthermore, the political editor of the Daily Mail and the former director-general of the British Chamber of Commerce appear to have a comrade in Nick Gutteridge, who reports approvingly of Taleb’s assessment that a revolution is in progress: ‘And he hailed the Brexit result as kicking off a revolutionary “wave” that is “spreading”, adding that working class people “are intelligent . . . and they realise globalisation doesn’t pay for them, it pays for someone else”.’
Like the regional and generational divides in the UK, the class division between the winners and losers in the globalized, knowledge economy emerged long before the EU referendum was held, but the unexpected result shone a very bright light upon an issue that the winners had been happy to leave undiscussed. As noted earlier in this work, in the final days of the referendum campaign journalists like Suzanne Moore and Owen Jones had sensed that enough working class people were sufficiently disenchanted to wish to stick two fingers up at a political class they felt did not care about them. Moore and Owen were right; it was the results in the Labour heartlands that gave Leave their victory. A pyrrhic victory perhaps, for many would argue that for ordinary people the only consequence of the Brexit vote was to replace one elite with another.
From a purely semantic point of view, David Runciman, Nassim Taleb and others misuse the word elite. An elite should be relatively small in number but disproportionately strong in terms of power and influence, but the 48 per cent who voted Remain were numerous (16,141,241 to be precise) and during a tense night in 2016 suffered a painful defeat. As Nick Cohen (2017) ironizes:
At 48 per cent, Britain now has the largest elite in political history. This supposed elite breaks with another precedent. Uniquely, it is an elite which is everywhere except the one place an elite needs to be: in power. A powerless elite is not much of an elite at all. It exists only as a propaganda target for the holders of real power.
Whether we call them the elite, Anywheres or simply the winners, the referendum gave them the novel experience of suffering a defeat. Not everyone accepted that defeat with good grace. Predictably, there were calls for a second vote, and equally predictably both the government and the main opposition party knew that such a proposal was not politically feasible. However, the British people would not have to wait very long before going to the polling booths again.
15
The issue that would not go away: The general election of 2017
After repeatedly saying that her government would serve its full term until 2020, on 18 April 2017, Theresa May surprised many people by announcing that there would be a ‘snap’ general election on 8 June. In some ways the timing was odd since just twenty days earlier she had triggered Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, which set the clock ticking on the two-year period that the UK had to negotiate with Brussels and reach an acceptable exit deal. Hammering out an agreement in just two years was never going to be easy given the complicated nature of the issues involved plus the fact that whatever terms were negotiated would have to be ratified by twenty-seven national parliaments, each of which would have a veto over the conditions. The decision to permit the distraction of an election campaign when there was so much work to do struck some people (though not an enormous number) as capricious, if not downright irresponsible. By April 2019 Britain would be out of the EU, deal or no deal, and the government already had a working majority of seventeen in the House of Commons.
Theresa May’s view was that going on the stump for fifty days was not time wasted at all since re-election with a significantly improved majority would show that the public trusted her, which would strengthen her hand when dealing with Brussels and allow her to conduct talks more effectively. At the time hardly anyone questioned her confidence that her party was heading for an emphatic victory. Polls showed the Conservatives twenty or more points ahead of Labour while the smaller parties had little reason to welcome new elections: UKIP was struggling to find a purpose now that the referendum had been won; the Liberal Democrats had still to win back their traditional supporters who had punished the party in 2015 for having entered into a coalition with the Tories; the SNP, after their extraordinary success two years earlier, knew that they could not improve upon that triumph and were more likely to shed a few seats. But what really convinced the prime minister that she must seize the day was the fact that her personal approval ratings were very high while those of Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, were abysmal. Corbyn was immensely popular with the rank and file who had elected and re-elected him party leader but was held in contempt by a great number of Labour MPs who considered him far too left-wing ever to be elected; many feared losing their seats in the upcoming election because of the ineptitude of their leader, and when Corbyn himself oozed quiet confidence in welcoming the prime minister’s decision, this merely confirmed suspicions that he was living on a different planet.
With Jeremy Corbyn apparently such a liability to his party, one might have expected the right-wing press to lay off him in the hope that he would remain Labour leader until 8 June, thus ensuring a Tory landslide. Not a bit of it. From the moment Mrs May announced her decision to go to the country, the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and The Sun launched a campaign of daily attacks on Corbyn and his two best-known colleagues, shadow chancellor John McDonnell and shadow home secretary Diane Abbott. The two key accusations were that they were Marxists whose plans for the economy would ruin the country, and that all three had a history of being unhealthily friendly with terrorists, from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) decades ago to the Islamists of today.
The day before the vote The Sun featured a photomontage of Jeremy Corbyn peering out from a dustbin and a dire pun in the headline to its unsigned editorial: THE SUN SAYS Don’t chuck Britain in the Cor-bin – vote Tory unless you want a friend of terrorists who’s ready to open borders and hike up taxes as our next PM (2017). Ten of the Labour leader’s vices are then listed: ‘terrorists’ friend, useless on Brexit, destroyer of jobs, enemy of business, massive tax hikes, puppet of unions, nuclear surrender, ruinous spending, open immigration, Marxist extremist’. Many Britons would have difficulty accepting the opening sentence as a description of the UK in 2017:
He would chuck our spectacular progress and prosperity over the last 35 YEARS in the bin.
Only a vote for the Conservatives – not Ukip or any other – will keep Corbyn and his sinister Marxist gang away from power.
If enough people vote Labour, Britain faces a nightmare beyond anyone’s experience.
An unsigned editorial in the Daily Mail – Labour’s apologists for terror: The Mail accuses Corbyn troika of befriending Britain’s enemies and scorning the institutions that keep us safe (2017) – begins with the generous assumption that the Labour leader was sincere in expressing sympathy for the victims of an ISIS-inspired attack on London Bridge days before the election, then signals a change of direction with a highly significant but.
But the ineluctable truth is that the Labour leader and his closest associates have spent their careers cosying up to those who hate our country, while pouring scorn on the police and security services and opposing anti-terror legislation over and over and over again.
Yes, Mr Corbyn has impressed some with his quiet composure under hostile question
ing. But he personally has spent a political lifetime courting mass murderers in the Middle East, Ireland and elsewhere in the world, affronting the party and its decent traditional supporters, while voting on 56 occasions against measures aimed at containing the terrorist threat.
Meanwhile his closest ally, the Marxist shadow chancellor John McDonnell, has called for MI5 and armed police to be abolished, while saying that the IRA murderers of men, women, children, British servicemen and police officers should be ‘honoured’.
As for Diane Abbott, the clueless and incoherent woman in charge of the security brief, she has voted against anti-terror measures 30 times, while declaring in the past that any defeat of the British state by IRA terrorists was a ‘victory’.
The headline contains the term troika, a Russian loan word that has acquired negative connotations since it began to be used to refer collectively to the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, the triumvirate that has imposed stringent austerity measures upon indebted eurozone states, most savagely upon Greece. If Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott formed a trio, they would be entertaining; as a troika they are dictatorial and heartless.
In the first and second paragraphs Corbyn is accused of first ‘cosying up to’ and then of ‘courting’ disreputable individuals who are not identified precisely, but are described as ‘those who hate our country’ and ‘mass murderers’ respectively. The Labour leader is also accused of affronting his party’s ‘decent traditional supporters’, with the implicature that the adjective decent cannot be used for Corbyn himself.
It later emerges that the main mass murderers are the IRA, and interspersed between the paragraphs of the online version of the editorial are three photographs of Corbyn with Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin, a party that presses for Northern Ireland to leave the UK and be reunited with the Republic of Ireland. The Mail neglects to remind us that Adams was a Westminster MP from 1983 to 1992 and again from 1997 to 2011 (although he always refused to sit in the Commons), so it was really not that scandalous for one elected representative of the people to talk to another. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought an end to sectarian violence, Sinn Féin has participated fully in the power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. Reconciliation was symbolized in 2015 when Prince Charles, during an official royal visit to Ireland, met Adams and shook his hand.
There are more ways to represent other people’s words than through conventional direct or indirect speech. Mick Short (1996: 288–325) identifies a number of alternative methods, including free indirect speech, the narrator’s representation of speech and the narrator’s representation of speech acts. Departures from conventional direct speech in inverted commas give the narrator greater scope to put a spin on what others said, but ostensibly verbatim quotes can also be misleading if they are incomplete or not clearly embedded in the original context. The Daily Mail editorial assigns one-word quotes to each of Corbyn’s comrades: ‘honoured’ for John McDonnell and ‘victory’ for Diane Abbott. There can be few anglophone adults who have not uttered those two words at some time in their lives, so in theory we could all be quoted in the same way. In both cases the alleged quotation comes at the end of a paragraph containing only the leader writer’s words (it is unlikely that Diane Abbot would describe herself as clueless and incoherent), so the contextless one-word citations are associated in the reader’s mind with things not uttered by McDonnell or Abbott, but written by an employee of the Daily Mail.
The Mail did at least acknowledge Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘quiet composure’, and during the seven-week campaign the Labour leader did indeed earn respect for his repeated assertion ‘I don’t do personal’ and his refusal to respond in kind to those who attacked his character rather than his policies. In addition, for the first time the public began to learn something about the man behind the politician, and discovered that he used public transport, grew vegetables on his allotment and made his own jam. Martin Townsend (2017), editor of the Sunday Express, was not taken in by that image of Corbyn as a friendly, good-natured sort of chap; on the contrary, he was a very dangerous individual whose reptilian qualities were extreme even for a Labourite.
Politicians are chameleons. They can be all things to all people, able to shape-shift effortlessly from suited authority in the House of Commons to ‘down with the people’ salt-of-the-earth charm out in their constituencies.
But even by the lower-than-a-toad’s-belly standards of the usual Labour Party lizards, Jeremy Corbyn has waged a seamlessly cynical campaign.
On Sky last week, the man whose policies place him far further to the Left than any Labour leader in living memory had morphed himself into an avuncular ‘Grandad’ figure.
A man of smiling, aged charm who used the same tone of voice to explain how he’d dither and dance around any decision to kill a terrorist in a drone strike (thereby saving hundreds of innocent lives) as he would to explain fly-fishing techniques to a wide-eyed grandson.
Can anyone even half-consider putting this man in charge of our nation’s security? Corbyn, once a joke figure, has become a deeply dangerous threat to us all.
Apart from his evident fascination with reptiles and amphibians, Townsend also displays a penchant for alliteration (‘seamlessly cynical’, ‘shape-shift’, ‘dither and dance’), a love of four-hyphen compound adjectives (‘salt-of-the-earth’, ‘lower-than-a-toad’s-belly), and an apparent inability to recognize ambiguity (‘down with the people’) or an unfortunate juxtaposition (‘avuncular “Grandad” figure’) in his own prose.
As always with nasty attacks of this nature in the right-wing tabloids, one has to ask whether they actually influenced floating voters or merely reinforced the beliefs and prejudices of readers who would never dream of supporting Jeremy Corbyn anyway. Post-election analyses revealed that young people had learnt their referendum lesson and turned out to vote in far greater numbers than they had done a year earlier, and that a clear majority of the 18–24 age group voted Labour. That demographic category probably does not form part of the Tory-supporting tabloids’ core readership, but some obviously had a look at the online editions and used Twitter and humour to respond to the demonization of the Labour leader. The hashtag #LastMinuteCorbynSmears allowed people to poke fun at the hysterical attacks by posting parodies of the more ridiculous accusations, often by questioning Corbyn’s gardening and jam-making skills, but also by lampooning his portrayal as an unpatriotic Marxist and law-breaker. Tom Stevens (2017) collected some of the wittier examples, including:
•Corbyn buys jam at Waitrose and steams the stickers off to pretend he made it.
•He bludgeons strawberries to death and boils them with sugar.
•Corbyn’s shared allotment turns out to be a socialist plot.
•Jeremy Corbyn reheats tea in the microwave, and thinks ‘Snickers’ is a far better name than ‘Marathon’.
•Jeremy Corbyn eats After Eights at 7.59.
•Corbyn has done a secret deal with FIFA to declare the 1966 World Cup Final ball did not cross the line.
Returning to The Mail and Sunday Express editorials cited above, a look at readers’ feedback reveals that a significant minority were willing to be quite vehement in expressing their dissent. The Mail’s Labour’s apologists for terror editorial prompted one reader to point out that during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Conservative prime ministers Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major all took part in negotiations with the IRA but, in contrast with Corbyn’s open talks with Gerry Adams, did so in secret. Others attacked the Daily Mail head-on:
•Far right propaganda, trying to confuse voters the day before the election. Exactly like how the media lied and tricked us into voteing to leave the EU!
•Unbelievable crap from the desperate DM. I’d be ashamed if I was a journalist in its employ. And if you believe the crap instead of truly educating yourselves on the issues and the policies then you don’t want a fair and decent society.
•Why would anyone want to vo
te for may?You [sic] people want the NHS privatised,you [sic] really don’t know what ur getting yourselves into.
•Shows how desperate the paper has become, worried now that it’s tax avoiding days may be over.
•No mention of May doing £ multi billion arms deals with the Saudis, who arm ISIS financially, ideologically and militarily.
Similarly, a minority of Sunday Express readers were unimpressed by Martin Townsend’s alliteration and reptilian metaphors.
•I smell your fear Martin Townsend, your woman of straw Mrs May is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, May the U –Turner who has overseen the decimation of the police and armed forces who won’t face Mr Corbyn in debate but we are expected to believe she will stand up for Britain over Brexit.You [sic] and your paymasters are starting to panic and I like it.
•He has been positive. I like him. Theresa May has been negative. End of story. Goodnight and bless you all.xx [sic]
•Third attempt to get through your censorship of comments…. Fake news – beware of Tory sponsored smear tactics.
•The only people that are waging a seamlessly cynical campaign are the Tory lead media and and [sic] their newspapers on Jeremy Corbyn, the spinless editor of this piece of fake news knows which way his bread is buttered
Townsend’s editorial was published three days before election day and The Sun and The Mail pieces just one day before the vote. What is evident in all three is that Brexit is not the main issue. Although May had said that she had opted for an early election in order to secure a strong mandate to lead Brexit negotiations as she saw fit, in practice she immediately turned the poll into a vote of confidence in her own leadership qualities. Her message to the electorate was very simple: vote for me because I am a leader while Jeremy Corbyn most definitely is not. Her key soundbite was ‘strong and stable leadership’ and one had the impression that she would have been content to say nothing else at all throughout the election campaign. Her friends in the popular press duly made Corbyn’s lack of leadership qualities their main focus, at first portraying him as almost comically inept, then, as some (but not all) polls showed Labour closing the gap, turning up the heat to present him as an evil communist with a history of supporting terrorists. Brexit, including immigration, was not what the election was about.
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 18