Tag Archives: Brexit

How Brexit Made Me A Bigot

Bugger Brexit

My partner Jackie pointed out to me yesterday that I’m a bigot. That is, that I judge people from a few simple criteria and will avoid their company because of it. I realised that she’s right, and I’ve changed. I would never have done this before Brexit.

For me, Brexit was a terrible revelation. Up to the referendum vote, I had a “live and let live” attitude. Other people might have different values to me, but we all rubbed along following our own goals and agendas, living lives we were pretty much happy with alongside like-minded friends, and despite those we disagreed with.

I was respectful and kind to those I thought could have made better choices in life. I had no idea how they might change, and no idea how to make that happen even if I wanted them to change. After all, how could I reason with them when many of their decisions were shaped by their world experience and the weight of the media. One man can’t go up against that. I supposed these people I considered poorly educated and ignorant didn’t really affect me. So, fine. Live and let live. I was optimistic that people generally were reasonable and kind, and we had enough of a shared view of the world to say we were from the same country and we could all just get by, living our own lives and pursuing our own dreams.

And then came the vote for Brexit.

Suddenly the things I really cherished and valued were being taken away from me.

The truth is, I love otherness. I love the “exotic”, the strange and unusual. I love the foreign, because it tells me about a whole new form of life, a lived experience I have never had. I have so many happy memories of new things and new cultures.

Like, for example, travelling through Germany and trying out my rudimentary German by haggling in the Schwarzwald, and making bad jokes in German in a sauna in Bremen (much to the other users’ disapproval). I’ve argued the bill in a cafe in Alsace and I’ve joined in German folk dances in a mediaeval castle taking direction through sign and speech. I’ve stood and looked out at the countryside from a model of the world’s largest toilet and I’ve seen the world’s craziest cuckoo clock, and also heard the deep lowing of the world’s most gigantic wooden cuckoo. Basically, in Germany I’ve enjoyed the country’s freedom and general eccentric weirdness.

In France, I’ve walked on glaciers and discussed history and politics with young people. I’ve been to a massive Buddhist monastery in Burgundy and laughed with waiters and customers in the French language in Brittany. I’ve discussed art with a French artist and walked through the Tuilleries with a friend whom I later discovered to be a high class prostitute, having a crisis because she had discovered she was carrying a client’s baby. I’ve discussed politics in a French market and I’ve been to Alsacean cultural events where sentences started in French and ended in German.

In Spain, I’ve sailed through fog from port to port and seen the rock of Gibraltar appear far too close to our yacht out of thick fog, I’ve explored the Sierra Nevada, speaking broken Spanish and staying at pensions high in the mountains and looked out across desert landscapes and plasticultura. I’ve cried at the beauty of a flamenco dancer in a Spanish bar, and met strangers who became friends while wandering alone the streets of Barcelona.

In Luxembourg I’ve been to an extraordinary festival of young classical musicians and heard Luembourgish on the radio. In Switzerland I’ve been giddy at the sight of the massive perspective of the Alps and had heart arrhythmia on a mountain overlooking the Matterhorn (suffering from a very slight touch of mountain sickness). At one point in my life, I learned how to read Arabic script (badly), and Greek (now forgotten) and Russian Cyrillic (scratching the surface) – just enough to remind me how different every part of the world is, and how that is a joy to experience. Europe, especially, has been like a massive wellspring of learning and joy for me. I would say Europe is my identity, although of course I was born in Portsmouth.

I’ve asked taxi-drivers to teach me Czech while driving from the airport, then ordered beers and bought tickets with the faltering Czech I learned that day. I’ve talked with bakers in their shop in Prague to discuss the merits of different sweet cakes. I’ve loved it all, tbh.

Europe is an adventure.

My outward-looking curiosity and joy at “the other” – at what is not me, and outside my normal experience has driven me forward. It is who I am.

And now, although it is true that with the right paperwork I will be able to travel through my beloved Europe again, it will be with the knowledge that I can not just up sticks and stay wherever I want on a whim as I could have done in the past. I can’t just walk into a bar and get a job without the prospect of horrendous paperwork and visas, and with no guarantee that I will be allowed to stay. That hurts who I am. It limits my freedom in a way I never imagined anyone would wish to do.

These days, I don’t regard England as one country. It is two. One country has Brexiteers running it. Though there are some who may generally believe in the outward-looking “global Britain” those in power sold to them, most of the Brexiteers I have encountered have a different motive. Fear. Fear of the other. Fear of change. Fear of “foreigners coming over here” and in some indefinable way, making life worse, when really they just mean different, and richer and more interesting.

On the other side is the England of the Europhiles – most of the ones I’ve met being interested by the world outside English dominance and English language, fascinated by the world and at home in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Riga or Athens.

And so, I am no longer the naive, optimistic traveller I once was. After the deep psychological shock of realising that ignorant people can change my life and limit my choices, I carry a genuine sense of grief inside me all the time. A deep sense of injustice and stinging pain at having the freedoms I once enjoyed taken away from me for reasons I have tried and tried to understand, but that make no sense to me. Why don’t they make sense? Because the priorities of those people are directly opposed to mine, and because of this starting point, their reasoning is something I find utterly wrong and hence unintelligible. I simply cannot understand my fellow English who are Brexiteers. I experience with them a more profound lack of comprehension than I have encountered meeting countless Europeans around Europe.

I suppose Jackie is right. I have become what I always disliked. Nowadays I make my judgement about Brexiteers before I meet them. How strange and sad it is to think how badly Brexit has changed both me and Britain. Whereas before I was open and accepting of my fellow Englishman, now I am suspicious. I have become, I suppose, one of the very bigots I despised in this now hopelessly divided nation.

On hearing Beethoven’s 9th on Brexit Day

Brexit image

Sitting in my car today, on the 1st day of 2021, when Britain has departed from the rest of the European Union, I switched on the radio to hear the steady build-up of the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony – the “Chorale”, and I was suddenly thrown back on myself and the awful struggle that has been part of my life over the last 4 years as I hoped with a passion that Britain would not be so foolish as to REALLY leave the EU.

Hearing the tune that is used at the EU anthem on the day the connection was cut hit me like a hammer blow – the pain I felt, the sadness and the longing that mingled together.

Behind all my rage about Brexit is a simple truth: deep grief about the loss of that part of my identity bigger and better than pure Britishness. It is a psychological diminishment I may never recover from. The EU added richness to my Britishness, it did not limit it.

I mean this in the same way that I am English and Celtic. The Celtic part of my identity embedded me in a rich non-Anglo-Saxon tradition. My European Union citizenship did exactly the same.

It’s interesting to me, and saddening, that while many Brexiteers vaunted identity and a pure British identity as the desired object of their politics, it is exactly the opposite of that purity – the richness of mixing it up – that gave my life a sense of joy.

What I find fascinating is the feeling comes form the tangible. I had often mocked Brexiters for becoming so passionate about the colour of their travel document, but now that I see the legal support and underpinning, the treaties and the international understandings a passport represents removed from me, I can at least understand something of their passion, even if the thing in itself that I miss is the direct opposite of what they wanted.

Let’s be clear, the future that I imagined and loved was a European one, just as they imagine a British one.

I don’t know how that rift will be mended within a UK that essentially is two nations now: one that looks to its homeland in Europe, with all the enlightened attitudes and politics that entails, and its opposite – an aggressive nationalism. Do I feel I have more in common with friends in France, Germany or the Netherlands than I do with my next door neighbour? Yes, absolutely. I was quite happy to accept them on terms of equality under the stars of the EU flag, rather than regard them as strangers under two flags. We were, somehow, sharing an endeavour of building a unique civilization that was broad, big and most of all optimistic.

I have no idea how to stop this pain. The thing Brexit has taught me, is after this sense of loss and pain, I am now a European more than I ever was when I was in the EU. The parting and pain makes the identity more meaningful. This will never go away. So, we are two nations in the UK. I will never love my country in the way I once did, because that country has told me I cannot be who I am at my heart.

I distrust narrow nationalism with a passion that comes from hating the nationalism of The Third Reich or of The British Empire. Neither were about equality, and this is what I find so troubling about the direction Britain is now headed in.

But that is enough. For now, I’ve had my say.

Disruption, Farage, Brexit – and the Winchester Gallop

Brexit has many historical precedents, all of them bloody, writes Matt Wingett.

When royal wannabe Harold Godwinson was blown off course and shipwrecked on the coast of Northern France, that disaster was bad for him, but very good for William the Bastard, who had already set his French Norman heart on the English throne. Because, what with furniture delivery services being in their infancy, and there being no customs union, how else could William get hold of the prized English throne, if not by invasion?

William needed a pretext. Being called the Bastard, he lived up to his name by tricking Harold into swearing loyalty to him. What’s worse, he did it while Harold unwittingly had his hands on a reliquary fully of bits of saints, so he definitely had to deliver. At least that’s how the Bayeux tapestry spins it. Which meant, when some years later Harold pronounced himself King Harold after the death of Edward the Confessor, William the Bastard had a reason to invade.

The point is, William the Bastard was devious, and knew how to use disruption for his advantage. 333 years of oppression by Norman and Plantagenet aristocracy would follow in England.

When the king formerly known as William the Bastard died in 1087, (a focus group having decided “The Conqueror” was a better brand), the tradition of The Winchester Gallop began. William Rufus made a dash from Rouen to the treasury at Winchester, determined to be declared King before anyone else took the gold – and succeeded in becoming William II.

Rufus was meant to be king. Imagine how much more important that gallop was for anyone who might face a counter-claim. Thus successive Bishops at Winchester shot eyes to the ceiling at the death of another monarch and waited for the clatter of cavalry in the courtyard. Because, with possession being nine tenths of the law, whoever held the country’s money held the crown. And who was a mere bishop to gainsay the intention of 20 titled thugs in armour waving swords, after all?

When William Rufus promptly died during a hunting “accident” at which his brother Richard just happened to be present in the New Forest (at a spot known as Rufus Stone, quelle coïncidence!) it was Richard’s turn to gallop northward and grab the gold and the power.

Other gallopers included the Empress Matilda, who had been left control of the country by dead daddy Henry I, but who was beaten to the gold by interloper King Stephen. This contretemps led to The Anarchy, which deadlocked the country in civil war for nearly two decades. Something that in the current state of Brexit play, with divisions all over the the UK, seems quite possible again.

A few hundred years later, London replaced Winchester as the centre of power, and so the Winchester Gallop was no more – but the seizing of opportunities caused by disruption remained.

Just so, when one June Wednesday in 1381, an army of 50,000 peasants parked themselves outside London waiting for the king to take up their cause against cruel landowners. As if the king wasn’t the biggest, cruellest landowner of all. (That’s how Royal propaganda works.)

King Richard II, a lad of 14 years, whose army had refused to fight the massive army of peasants, went out to treat with the peasant leader, proto-socialist Wat Tyler. Wat, not being well-versed in matters of courtly behaviour spoke to the king on equal terms, for which insult, one of Richard’s knights took a slice off him. With Wat unexpectedly dead on the ground and the peasant army just a few hundred yards away, Richard did the opposite to what most sane people would have done, and spurred his horse alone toward the peasant army, shouting to them “You shall have no captain but me.”

It worked. By the time the peasants had realised they’d been had, an army had at last been mustered from London to meet them. The ringleaders were arrested and in the usual way, many of the poorest and most idealistic died horribly in the aftermath.

This fake “man of the people” soon showed his hand. “You wretches, detestable on land and sea; you who seek equality with lords are unworthy to live. Give this message to your colleagues: rustics you were, rustics you are still. You will remain in bondage, not as before, but incomparably harsher. For as long as you live we will strive to suppress you, and your misery will be an example in the eyes of posterity. However, we will spare your lives if you remain faithful and loyal. Choose now which course you want to follow.”

So, what’s the lesson from these moments in history? For certain self-serving individuals, moments of disruption lead to opportunity. Caught up in all the noise, and either fooled by leaders to fight on their behalf, or tricked into believing them, it’s the common man who gets screwed, suffering from the ambition, egos and maniacal thirst for power of the ruthless who are quite happy to tip the country into a tail-spin for their own gain.

The rule is, when disruption occurs, psychos win.

Sound familiar? Because that’s exactly what’s going on with Brexit. The ringleaders of Brexit all personally having plenty of money, know they have nothing to lose, but thanks to the disruption that continues to swirl around Brexit, each has plenty to gain.

The language of disruption and conquest isn’t even hidden by Brexiters. Daniel Hannan, the modernday wild-eyed prophet of Brexit, proclaims Britain should be a “buccaneering” country. If ever there were a motif of redtoothed rapaciousness and theft, it is the buccaneer – a state-sponsored pirate. Mr Hannan would like to fit masts to the island of Britain, sail down to China, pound it from the shoreline and burn down the odd village or two like we did in the Opium Wars, another period of state-enabled jolly-rogering of other nations. Sure, it was post-buccaneer, but back then Britain could make up the rules without reference to anyone else, and did so at every opportunity.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is another disrupter in the same vein. The disruption he seeks is in the financial markets, and the money he will make comes from hedge funds. Disruption = massive market movements, and in the wake of all that turbulence, Moggy just needs to gallop on his field hunter to the nearest internet hotspot to check his burgeoning treasury. There are even some sycophants calling for him to be PM and willing to back it up with violence. Not quite as glitzy as the chainmail look of former thugs, but you get the gist.

This extract from Jacob Rees Mogg’s twitter feed shows how sections of the country are keen to enable his power grab.

For Boris Johnson, the prize was always coronation. The disruption and strife that he exacerbated within the Tories he also still hopes to “solve” by being crowned PM. Think the same of Gove and numerous other Brexiteer Tories, too numerous to name. Our pain is their gain.

“Bad Boy of Brexit” Arron Banks is now sounding increasingly desperate on twitter to distract attention from growing interest in his alleged Russian-funded shenanigans by attacking the latest White Paper to come out of Chequers. Little did he realise that the chutzpah displayed in calling himself the “Bad Boy of Brexit”, might soon be hubristically translated to alleged “Lawbreaker of Leave”.

Then, of course, there’s Nigel Farage, whom I imagine one day in his youth saw the letters “N.F.” sprayed on a wall next to a swastika and took that as an omen. What gains are there for him?

Of all of them, Nigel is the most obvious. After the rigged referendum result was announced, Trump was soon calling for Nige to be made ambassador to the US. Disruption. Trump lobs a twitter-bomb, scares the markets, then while everyone is in disarray, sends in the tanks.

Of course, Trump’s blitzkrieg tactic didn’t stand a chance at the time, but it was a jab, a softening-up blow that cracked the surface and allowed a seed to be planted. Soon, other calls for Farage to be knighted followed – as did his faux outrage at not being so honoured when he knew there was no chance.

This posturing has a purpose – to create a narrative of grievance that at some point Nige will want to use while orchestrating the latest outcry. That may come soon. The EU has already said it won’t divide the Four Pillars of freedom in the EU. Yet this is what May’s White Paper wants. Very soon, May could be facing all-out revolt again*, or a collapse in her shaky government.

And in all that disruption? Watch out. The Winchester Gallop is alive and well, and Mogg, Banks, Gove, Johnson, Farage et al are saddling up.


*Since writing this piece, David Davis has resigned. Watch this space.

Ah. There goes Boris, like a great sulking parody of a colonial Viceroy, but with hair instead of feathers.


Further update, August 2019. Well, Boris Johnson is now PM, him having made the Winchester Gallop before all other successors, and the jester king is now threatening to wreck the economy for his own aggrandisement. Once again, he will not loose out. But the peasants he so royally promises to destroy adore him. Funny old world, eh?

Introduction to 50 sonnets for liberals in troubled times

2016 was a shocker. Watching the vile rabble-rousing debates about Brexit was repugnant, the morning of the loss, grief-inducing. At that moment I, like many other optimistically outward-looking friends who understand how co-operation in Europe has given us peace and prosperity for 70 years went into black, horrified grief and shock. Was the country really so stupid as this? So intolerant and unkind? The fire-bombings of immigrant shops and racist attacks on the streets that ensued seemed to answer that question.

And then there was the rise of Donald Trump. After his win we got to hear Nigel Farage crowing, the pair of them getting it on like the far right Anglosphere’s own psychotic Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dummer. At the same time, the rise of other far right extremists across Europe was depressing. Their presence was one of my main reasons for wanting to stay in the EU – because to leave was to launch the whole continent in the direction of the same far right savagery that had torn the continent to pieces only 70 years before.

What surprised me about the rise of the right this time was how little people seemed to have learned from the 1930s – not such distant history. It’s almost an algorithm. You get the very rich making everyone else poorer through malpractice and deception, and the poor will listen to anyone who can name a semi-plausible scapegoat, because they don’t want to face the uncomfortable truth that those rich industrialists and venture capitalists whose success they admire are making their lives worse. When an abuse is so extreme even the right wing Press object to it, such as Phillip Green’s disdainful mistreatment of workers at BHS, or Sports Direct putting people to work in Victorian condition, then this is seen as exceptional, not an indicator of the attitude to the poor of many in business. No. That would smack of socialism. And that’s evil.

So, who to blame? Last time round it was Jews. This time round, it was the EU. As I trawled the deeper recesses of the internet, it also became clear “the EU” was code used by many far right fascists to mean “Jews” once again. Some videos I watched argued the whole EU project had been designed as part of a Jewish conspiracy to eradicate the “white race” – whatever those two words are supposed to point to.

For most people besieged by the lies of the Brexit campaign, their conscious thoughts were a long way from fascism. In the last eight years, they’d become generally poorer, felt they weren’t getting on, were unable to buy a house and had to rent, their wages had stagnated, and the waiting lists at hospitals had lengthened Pinocchio-like as Osborne and Cameron lied that “we’re all in this together”.

The British experience of poverty in the 21st Century is for many a pale shadow of the poverty we had in the 1930s. Not for everyone, though. There are people going to food banks to stop themselves starving, living in slum homes without central heating, the plaster coming off the walls. But most people complaining about the EU weren’t suffering that sort of hardship. Instead, they were aware that they weren’t getting on how they thought they would. There are more billionaires in Britain than ever, but the majority struggled on under the yolk of austerity that Cameron and Osborne cooked up as a pretext to run down the Welfare State and sell it to their friends in private business. If ever you want a demonstration of how poverty is relative, then look at Britain’s squeezed middle. If ever there were an argument for redistribution of wealth from rich to poor to keep social stability (not poor to rich as is happening in the US and UK at the moment), Brexit is it.

Nevertheless, many people sought somebody to blame for their hardship (perceived or real) and that somebody was “Europeans”.

Blame was piled on foreigners by papers like the Daily Mail (are there any papers like it? It’s in a class of misery-making all its own), that putrid organ of vile hatred and lies deemed so unreliable not even Wikipedia will cite its “news”. Aiding and abetting were The Sun and The Times. No surprise these great factories of hatred wanted out. Murdoch’s influence has never been great in Europe. Best to divide the UK from the mainland to bolster his private fiefdom.

In the meantime, the amnesiac people of Britain forgot what a united Europe had achieved post-war. Apart from the peace, it had continuously improved lives, cleaned the environment and heightened people’s chances in general. It had developed problems – largely resulting from the neo-liberalism (that economic tool misused by right-wingers) foisted on Europe by Thatcher and Major in the ’90s. But this was not stated in the Press, only stories of straight bananas, of which there was never one in sight, because that was another tabloid lie.

The British had chosen to forget that European co-operation had brought us peace, and that’s because as a country we’ve never got beyond fetishising the bloody and savage total warfare of World War II. Despite the fact that back then Britain had an Empire of subjects to draw on for our part in the war, while Russia and America also did much of the heavy lifting, still many yearned for Britain’s mythical “finest hour”. That was great Battle of Britain rhetoric, but those words having become an emblem for the whole war, by the 21st Century they were well past their “use by” date.

No matter, the British continued to pour it on their fish and chips, poisoning themselves in the process. Thus, the British continue to live with archetypes of Germans as enemies, despite our supreme monarch (God bless ‘er) being one of those untrustworthy foreign immigrants.

At the same time, there are new threats to Europe. Putin is one, alongside his poodle, Trump. That Putin has ordered 1500 T14 tanks – a weapon that outguns, outmanoeuvres and outclasses anything we have in the West, is telling. If you regard the Crimea as his Sudetenland, then expect to see agitation in the Baltic states and Poland, soon…

The woes go on. Such unhappy thoughts troubled me for months. My outrage at the stupidity of two formerly savvy nations, Britain and the US, in falling for nationalist lies meant I was (and, actually, still am) unable to hold a rational discussion with a Brexiter or a Trump supporter. I’ve said about six words to my neighbours since the disaster of Brexit.

This rage had to go somewhere. Two months ago I started obsessively putting down thoughts in sonnet form. The sonnet is great. With the Shakespearean variant, you’ve got 14 lines to play with, comprising three quatrains (four lines of alternating rhymes) plus a rhyming couplet at the end – and that’s it.

An outlet at last. The unending cycle of rage I felt could be contained. Thinking about the subjects of the sonnets helped me to begin exploring why some people had voted for Trump or Brexit, and get a sense of how it happened.

But let’s be honest, that’s not the reason I wrote these poems. It’s not all nicey, nicey liberal “let’s understand the fascist people that are ruining the world and give them a big forgiving huggy wuggy” stuff. No, these sonnets are a means to channel my anger so it stops devouring me.

I wrote 50 sonnets in about two months. Some days they poured out of me. I’ll be honest, there are some good ones, some excellent, some a bit clunky. Are they “great” literature? Nah. But they have helped me get this horror into some perspective and reaffirmed my core beliefs. Right wingers will hate them, of course. But then, who cares? This is for people who hope for a better world through co-operation, not through owning guns and believing that all our woes are manufactured in China or Syria, or thinking that Christ would have wanted the Samaritan to walk by on the other side.

It’s cleared my head a bit. I hope it does the same for you.

Matt Wingett 31st March, 2017.

That Article 50 Letter In Full

That Article 50 Letter In Full.

Dear Europe, I thought I’d write a quick line
to say it was good fun, thanks for the stay,
the visit was lovely, but we’re off, today
so please – no more garlic, snails and fine wine.
About the war. When I said “thanks” are nice
– and you said “the EU is the thank you” –
how come? Strangers telling us what to do
is wrong… though, yes, the Empire was quite nice.
Brexit means Brexit, a red white and blue
one, let’s salute the flag, coz now we’re free
to climb into bed with Uncle Sam. See:
foreigners can’t shaft us! – Britannia rules!
So goodbye, toodle pip, we’ve seen the light,
who needs Puccini when we’ve got Marmite?

Lyonesse – A Sonnet

Lyonesse

I was wrong about the blind right, thinking
them haters and racists. No, some believe
all will be well – we’ll have perpetual spring
– a world full of golden light. How naïve!
Though in some ways a relief, it is sad
to see these creatures crow about their mess
cheerily marching forward waving flags
to the sunny uplands of Lyonesse.
I wonder when they see our destiny’s
much more mundane, will they say “I was wrong” –
or “foreigners wrecked our identity” –
that wartime complaint that goes on and on?
And me, what to do? Should I pack my trunk?
– Get out of this country before it’s sunk?

The Power of Stupid

“The Power of Stupid”

Have you seen the latest? Shocking! she says,
lifting a copy of the Daily Mail,
that collection of British fairytales
from the fifties, when darkies knew their place.
Did you see that old sod Junckers, saying
there’ll be a cost to Brexit. Excuse me!
Cheeky bastard! Over my dead body!
We’ll walk right out, we’re not bloody paying!
Oooh, Trump, I like his conviction! Classy!
just look at how he held Theresa’s hand –
that proves it – really, he’s a gentleman
– if she thinks he’s all right, then he must be.
Thus politics shrinks to banality
when dupes idolize personality.

Power to Persuade: the techniques used by Paul McKenna for Brexit.

paul“Whoever is orchestrating the Leave campaign, I have to admit, they’re brilliant,” I said to a friend a few days before the referendum vote. “They understand exactly the rules of persuasion.”

On the side I favoured, the Remain camp was floundering in very much the way the same crew had floundered in the final days of the Scottish Independence referendum before that final intervention – The Vow. They had fallen into the same mistakes: relying on warnings, and apparently plucking apocalyptic figures out of the air.

The Leave camp was also making unfounded promises, lying and misrepresenting the facts. But there was something qualitatively different between the two campaigns, and that was in the structure of the information they imparted.

“The Leave campaign,” I said to my friend, “is in a different league.”

Years before, I had studied persuasion while attending trainings with hypnotist Paul McKenna and his mentor, Dr Richard Bandler, in a widely misunderstood field called NLP, or Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

NLP is a fascinating subject. It studies the structures of human thinking, in order to guide the flow of behavioural responses. It does this through linguistic and non-linguistic communication which may be delivered at an unconscious or semi-conscious level. It therefore bypasses reason.

It has its critics, which divide roughly into two camps. There are those who say it is manipulative and unethical, and the others who say it doesn’t work and is snake oil. As Dr Bandler often points out in interview, both cannot be true. NLP is not unethical in itself, but like any tool, it can be used unethically.

Central to the training we received was the observation that decisions, thoughts and behaviour are dependent on emotional state. Hence, if you are angry with someone, it is very difficult to remember that you love them. If you are in love with someone, it is easier to forgive them; if you like someone, you are more likely to be relaxed with them and trust them, and so on. Reasoning is continually influenced by emotions; not to recognise that is to lay yourself open to all sorts of errors of judgement through other people’s influence.

Understanding how emotion works enables you to get different outcomes from your interactions. For example, after an argument, it is probably a mistake to immediately seek forgiveness. The rage is still too high in the person from whom you are seeking forgiveness. First you must change their state, or wait for their state to change. Then you can get a better result from your appeal.

Understanding the structure of emotions and how they are inter-related is central to one of the key uses of NLP: persuasion. That is why in the hands of a skilled practitioner, NLP is an extremely effective tool when it comes to sales.

This should not come as a surprise. Dr Richard Bandler, the inventor of the term NLP spent years studying and modelling the ways that persuasive salespeople operate. He didn’t invent good sales techniques – he codified them. Through his observations, he came to understand that a salesperson first of all builds a rapport with his audience so they in some way identify with the saleperson. This makes the customer less critical and more trusting of what the salesperson says.

That’s step 1: the gaining of trust through rapport.

Next comes the creation of a “propulsion system” – meaning a way to get someone to take an action, or to change their thinking.

In Richard’s terms, propulsion systems operate quite simply. Firstly you generate a picture or idea of the current situation that’s so awful the subject wants to move away from it. Having built up an emotion of revulsion or disgust, you then simply create its antithesis, a scenario or situation that the subject wants to move towards. Moving towards this happier scenario or idea relieves the revulsion previously built up. It therefore feels like it’s the answer to the problem presented.

This technique can be used for all sorts of things, not just sales. For example, Richard observed that those who kicked an addiction often reported that life had to get so bad for them that they were desperate to change. There it is again: moving away from – moving towards.

Recreating this pattern of thinking deliberately for his clients, Richard laid out the negatives of current behaviour and the extraordinary positives of a new behaviour. Crucially, this was not done as an intellectual exercise. It required the firing up of the emotions to make the change, because psychologists have long known that the will is the least effective part of the psyche to employ if you want to make a change.

In many cases, it works. Bandler found that addicts then committed themselves to new behaviours willingly and with their whole being, rather than making an intellectual decision which they easily broke when they were overwhelmed by an emotion.

Exactly this model was used by the Leave camp. First rapport building, then creating, or describing or presenting a bad situation that was apparently unsolvable was followed by what appeared to be the only solution that would alleviate the bad feeling: leaving the EU. It was, in NLP terms, technically brilliant.

I looked on, thinking that surely our side, the Remain side, must have their own advisers. Cameron, having been involved in political strategy for years, must also have someone who understood the structure of persuasion in the way the Leavers did.

Quite the opposite appeared to be the case.

The Remain camp appeared to have no concept of rapport building. They wheeled out economists and experts who essentially spoke down to the public, alienating those who were of a different class or background.

Then there was Eddie Izzard. If anyone could have been better chosen to alienate conservative-minded voters concerned at the way society had changed over the last few decades, a man in a dress with a pink beret could not have been better chosen. For Leave voters, he represented exactly the sort of moral decay that a friend’s Aunt Beryl summed up in her reasons for leaving: “I just want Britain to be like it was.”

The timbre of the Remain discussion was also very limited, and boiled down to basically half a persuasion strategy.

They repeatedly told people how bad things would be in the future outside of the EU – a good moving away from strategy. But they didn’t tie it together directly with a positive message. Like, for example, the fact that the economy was doing very well and we were about to overtake Germany and become the largest economy in the bloc in the next few years. Those different sides were mentioned, but were not tied together in a persuasive whole. The simple message of wanting to move away from one dark future towards another brighter one was not explicitly presented. Instead, only the down side was emphasised.

The problem with repeating the same strategy over and over again is that it begins to wear thin. Nor is it good enough to say, “to avoid that awful future, you must accept a continuation of this dull present.” It just doesn’t work that way, especially when the other side is offering jam tomorrow, if only you will be brave enough to make that change.

And there is the next part of the NLP persuasion strategy. Reframing objections. The Leavers cleverly reframed the notion of recklessness to bravery. Hence, Leavers weren’t foolhardy, they were intrepid. Once again, a negative was replaced with a positive. In contrast, Remainers were craven cowards afraid to “Take Back Control”. This slogan was thus attached to a positive self image, and became a simple way to encapsulate that feelgood factor in one simple slogan.

In NLP training, you are taught that the unconscious vibrates to such messages and feels better about itself again. This emotional orientation feeds on itself. Unconsciously, you have accepted that this course of action is right. It feels right, after all. Your unconscious can’t help itself. It wants to move towards a happier self image (at least in most cases) and a future associated with good feelings.

The power of the reframe was not understood by the Remain camp. The best David Cameron could do was to present his message in negative terms, saying, “I don’t believe we are quitters.” Really? Well, if you don’t believe that’s what we are, what do you think we actually are? People don’t like being called names. They like to have their egos massaged. Once again, only half the persuasion strategy was employed. No wonder the Leavers started to make real changes in people’s attitudes – not through reason, but through feeling.

Another strategy in persuasion techniques is that of inoculation. This is a technique which pre-empts objections to an argument, and seeks to neutralise it beforehand. This is exactly what happened whenever the Remain camp delivered their warnings for the future. For an NLP-savvy debater, this is the equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel. Tie a negative connotation to this warning behaviour and you invalidate it, especially if you have followers already keen to hear your argument, and already beginning to be sold on it.

Hence the repeated use of the terms “Project Fear” (borrowed from the Scottish referendum) and “scaremongering”. Soon, everything the Remainers said was scaremongering. The word was repeated by the Leavers over and over again, until it became anchored in the minds of its audience. It was brilliant. They played on emotions superbly. And even when they themselves stated stupid observations, like the one that said 80 million Turks would be able to move to the UK, the Leavers managed to drown out the counterargument from the Remainers that this too was scaremongering. They’d got there first with that one.

Much has been made of Michael Gove’s dismissive comment that we’ve all heard enough from experts. This, too, was brilliant inoculation and rapport building at the same time. It made Gove look as if he, too, were someone with no respect for education and was a common man. If you think about it, it is quite an extraordinary claim from a man who had been trying for years (by his own definition) to bring value back to education as Education Secretary. It was an extraordinarily dishonest line to take. Yet it worked. It spoke to the masses. “If he says we can ignore experts, well, we bloody well can!”

This is why this debate was so extraordinarily light on facts. The Leave campaign’s manifesto ran to a mere 1293 words, which is less than this article. Leave didn’t need facts. They needed anger and hope harnessed together to make the changes they needed.
So, it was brilliant NLP. I watched the campaign through the gaps in my fingers over my eyes. It was a slowmo car crash. I could see mistake on mistake being made by Remain, and no-one seemed to understand what was going wrong.

After the stomach churning result was delivered, it began to make sense. After the dust settled it became clear that at least one seriously heavy duty NLPer was on the Leave side. Paul McKenna, the Guardian reveals, is a friend of Arron Banks, who bankrolled the Leave.EU campaign. How far he was involved in the campaign is uncertain, though Paul will have at least cast his eye over the campaign material and advised on giving it tweaks.

Some people will complain that the Leave campaign was dishonest by doing this. There is no doubt at all that they were dishonest in many of their claims, but I suspect it wasn’t their specific claims where Paul’s real power came through.

What Leave wanted, and what they achieved, was an emotionally charged debate within which they could covertly make changes in attitudes in some of those who were undecided. As a supreme technician, this is Paul McKenna’s genius. He is just very, very good at what he does.

Whether it was ethical for the Leave camp to employ such tactics over a matter so vital to the future of the country, as opposed to selling someone a pair of shoes, is another matter. I know what I think about it, but this is not a discussion on that aspect of Paul’s brilliance.

The reality of the situation is, however, that the Remain side were out of date. They were using reason against emotion, the equivalent of using old field Howitzers against a side armed with cruise missiles.

And that is why we lost. We were outclassed at every move. Whoever made the decision not to take advice from people who understood the language and structure of persuasion was, in the end, the cause of our downfall.

I suspect that was Cameron, judging by his poor grasp of strategy.

A final thought: one of the major elements taught by Paul and by Richard in their NLP trainings is that such powerful techniques must be applied ethically. There is a practical reason for this advice. An ethical strategy prevents buyer’s remorse. A buyer who genuinely has their needs met doesn’t look up a few months later and think: hey, I was duped!

Whether this applies to this decision over the coming months, remains to be seen. I’m sure there will be much reinforcement of the message going on right now. That, too, is an NLP technique.

So what is the lesson? In the past, ancient kings consulted stargazers and mystics before battle and had spells cast for them. The modern politician must learn to do the same, otherwise he will enter the field at a massive disadvantage. Because people reason on the back of feelings, it’s vital to get their emotions right first, so they are receptive to your message. Once the mood is right, then it is also vital that you understand exactly how you are going to structure and deliver your message. It’s not just a question of getting up and treating it like an amateur schoolboy at an Eton debating society.

The Arcane Arts, then, are back in fashion.