What's the best cinematic version of Brexit? I've previously suggested the final sequence of The Italian Job, where the truck is suspended half way over a ravine and the crew can't get at their great pile of gold bars without tipping themselves into the abyss.
But from an Irish point of view, we probably need a double bill in which it is shown alongside another British classic from the same era, The Wicker Man. Some horror fans have already noted the prescience of Summerisle, where most of the film is set. It is an Atlantic island that has cut itself off from the mainland and adopted a crazy cult. The cult is led by Lord Summerisle, a man with a self-consciously orotund vocabulary, mad hair and a great line in sacrificing the young generation for his bonkers beliefs – Christopher Lee as Boris Johnson, in other words.
But the most interesting parallel is the arrival on Summerisle of Edward Woodward’s Sergeant Neil Howie, innocently intent on doing his duty of investigating a suspected murder. He thinks of himself as embodying the majesty of the British state.
He is upright. He is judgmental. He is righteous. And he is very devoutly Presbyterian, possibly even of the Wee Free variety. He is, of course, the Democratic Unionist Party. Howie becomes increasingly aware that he has no idea where he really is, that he has taken a one-way trip to a place with its own fatal laws. Lord Summerisle eventually summons him to his horrible death: "We confer upon you a rare gift, these days – a martyr's death. You will not only have life eternal, but you will sit with the saints among the elect. Come!"
A 500km-long border barrier with turnstiles that open when we brush our passports against the 'gizmo'?
It is true that Lord Boris did not say these words in that private dinner with Tory diehards last week. But what he says on the recording leaked to Buzzfeed places Irish unionism right inside the giant Wicker Man with the torches just about to touch the kindling.
It is not so much the idiocy of Johnson’s repeated belief that an international border is just like moving around London, though having previously compared the Irish frontier to passing from one London borough to another, he now compared it to travelling on the Tube: “You know, when I was mayor of London … I could tell where you all were just when you swiped your Oyster card over a Tube terminal, a Tube gizmo. The idea that we can’t track movement of goods, it’s just nonsense.”
‘This folly’
Fatuous as these comparisons are (a 500km-long border barrier with turnstiles that open when we brush our passports against the “gizmo”?), the real point is what came next, the hissy fit about this whole bloody Irish border business: “It’s so small and there are so few firms that actually use that Border regularly, it’s just beyond belief that we’re allowing the tail to wag the dog in this way.
We're allowing the whole of our agenda to be dictated by this folly." Infantile as this is, it expresses a kind of truth – one that is not yet spoken in public but soon will be. The truth is that the Brexiteers don't give a flying frig for Ireland, North or South – and that includes Irish unionism and the DUP.
The DUP has gone one further than poor Sergeant Howie and helped to construct the wicker cage in which unionism will be torched
Johnson and his chums ignored Northern Ireland in their Brexit campaign. That seemed to be the ultimate height of irresponsibility but they have now gone further – they are exploiting it. Their current strategy is to use the EU's offer of a special deal for Northern Ireland, preserving many of the advantages of the single market even while leaving it, as an opening through which they can force the EU to concede the same have cake/eat cake privileges to Britain. They are trying to turn the sympathy that comes from a horrible conflict, in which nearly 2 per cent of the population was killed or injured, into a way of getting one over on Michel Barnier. This is political depravity.
The Brexit balloon
But it won’t work and when it doesn’t, the rage that Johnson uttered in private will become more open and explicit. The Brexit balloon is supposed to soar into the skies when it cuts the ropes that bind it to Brussels. But its occupants are realising that there is another rope that keeps them earthbound – the one that ties them to Newry and Strabane.
To salvage their fantasies, they will cut that rope too. Brexit is an English nationalist project – it cannot allow the English bulldog to be wagged by an Irish tail. If the tail has to be cut off – sorry but pass the shears old man.
The DUP thinks it's the dog of course, but it's not. To the Brexit believers, we are all part of the same Irish "folly". The DUP has gone one further than poor Sergeant Howie and helped to construct the wicker cage in which unionism will be torched to appease the gods of Brexit. It could still save itself by voting with the opposition when the EU Withdrawal Bill returns to the House of Commons today. Or it can murmur ecstatically Kipling's Ulster 1912: "We are the sacrifice."