I’m all right, Giles. (Pull up the Brexit ladder.)

I thought back in 2011 that Giles Fraser was as wrong as could be with Occupy and the cathedrals. But today I find him talking Brexit gibberish, most recently in “Why won’t Remainers talk about family?”, his latest piece for UnHerd.com.

 

His essential thrust is that Brexit (preferably no-deal) will terminate the ‘neoliberal’ idea of freedom of movement, putting an end to our right to work anywhere we choose, ‘enabling’ (sic; he means forcing) ‘bright working-class children’ to remain in their communities, forming large extended families and looking after their old folk without any state support, so that all may live happily ever after, reclaiming “the most effective form of social security the world has even known: family and community life.” He doesn’t actually mention choruses of Knees up, Mother Brown or casks of Watneys Red Barrel (with a tooth-mug of Sanatogen for Grandma), but they are not very far from the picture he paints.

 

On one level it is a beautiful vision (despite the sloppy polemic), and one quite understands the nostalgia that imbues his manifesto. Yet it is a deeply unsatisfactory piece despite that, for three main reasons:

 

1. The stay-home policy he advocates is not to be applied to all evenly. His ‘conservative-Muslim GP friend’ (purveyor of convenient anecdotes to support the Fraser thesis) is presumably in the UK as a result of immigration at some stage in the past, and the large groups of Asian diners whom Fraser approvingly encounters in a curry-house in Tooting are also very far from the family-members that must have been left on the other side of the world when they or their forebears followed their dreams to a chilly UK.

 

But neither has Fraser felt it remotely necessary to take his own vow of stability. ‘Bright working-class children’ must be denied opportunities to leave home to pursue self-advancement, though for him, the Public School boy, it’s fine to have stints of study in Newcastle and Lancaster, or to pursue professional opportunity in Staffordshire, Oxford, London and Ghana, none of which is entirely within hand-holding distance of any elderly relatives who may remain in his native Hampshire), but then the rules aren’t for him, it appears, so that’s okay.

 

2. The idea of the fixed community may be attractive, but it cannot be a work of central planning or forced social engineering. Neither can it be held as a higher good than the freedom, say, of going to university (even as far from home as Newcastle, Lancaster or Oxford). Here people will mix and perhaps fall in love and even marry, and settle where and with whomsoever they please. And if freedom of movement is the Remainers’ chief desire, it is so with good reason: in the past Europe has seen too much limitation of movement through cultural, ethnic and physical barriers. (Even the dung-beetle is free to wander all its livelong day.)

 

3. For all his self-conscious championship of the poor, Fraser’s new recipe for societal health penalises the poor in general, and women in particular. As he ought to know as a parish priest, people forced to work long hours in multiple jobs (thus making their families more dependent on state support) do so through sheer financial necessity. It naturally suits him to cite feckless or self-centred individuals (who won’t even wipe their parents’ backsides) as part of his ‘case’. The reality is rather more varied and nuanced than that. He must know (despite his shameless misrepresentation of Luciana Berger’s Independent piece on Brexit and the Social Care sector) that some women are unable to provide care for their elderly not through avaricious fear of “lost earnings”, but simply through having too many other pressures to withstand. “Interestingly never once in the piece did she mention the word family,” he claims smugly, glad to have skewered his victim. And he’s right. Not once, but three times is family mentioned: ‘relatives’ in the first paragraph; ‘family members’ in the second; ‘families’ in the third. It is a telling and characteristic error: the cocksure laziness of the zealous.

 

Of course, things were no better in Fraser’s now-Golden Age when the women stayed put and neighbours were their own welfare state. My godmother, born in 1919 in Co Durham, was expected not to move or marry and to look after her brothers and their parents until their death. She would have made a wonderful wife and mother but ‘our Madge’ did what was required. When her own childless end came, it was the care of a niece, supported by the State, that saw her through. Apart from Yorkshire in the War, she had been nowhere, denied by circumstance not some self-absorbed ‘neoliberal’ quest, but the basic freedoms that Fraser takes for granted for himself, but not for others in Brexit’s dark regime.

 

Oddly, I have no trouble with his starting point that children are responsible for their parents. Or, as I would prefer to put it, families should be communities of mutual care and concern. But the idea that this should be enforced by a refusal to let people work beyond the border of their country (why not county?) is a wickedness that should have no place in a free, let alone Christian society.

 

Now, no-one is saying that it is desirable to abandon one’s old folk to the care of the state (until euthanasia becomes the norm?) while one swans off round the world in solipsistic luxury. But to imagine that this would be everyone’s choice, or to suppose that it is only by restricting freedoms and closing borders that one can assure a well-functioning society betrays a worrying but unsurprising totalitarianism in the Brexit mentality. It is truly a doleful path, a folly they’ll still be regretting when my generation are food for worms and fertilising Easter daffodils.