Quotes from Fintan O'Toole

On the lunatic fringe of Brexit – a fringe long enough to get in the eyes of rational governance – there is a belief that England can find itself only when the remnants of socialism and liberalism are burned off in the crucible of pain. Suffering is not a side effect of the great project; it is the medicine.

Asked on the eve of the referendum how EU membership made them feel, voters were given a list of eight words, four positive (happy, hopeful, confident, proud) and four negative (angry, uneasy, disgusted, afraid) and invited to choose up to four of them. Feelings of 'unease' dominated, with 44 per cent selecting this word, as against just 26 per cent who went for the most popular positive term, 'hopeful'. No other positive word was selected by more than 14 per cent.

He continued, sombrely, to evoke the more recent memory of the Great War: 'the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.

The future treaty which you are discussing has no chance of being agreed; if it was agreed it has no chance of being ratified; and if it were ratified, it would have no chance of being applied. And if it was applied, it would be totally unacceptable to Britain. You speak of agriculture which we don't like, of power over customs, which we take exception to, and institutions, which frighten us. Monsieur le president, messieurs, au revoir et bonne chance.6

At least the Nazis could have been, in Churchill's great and galvanic rhetoric, fought on the beaches, hills, fields and streets. They offered the 'chance to fight back'. The new German invasion, cloaked in the guise of peaceful co-operation, is more damnable because it does not give the English Resistance a proper physical target.

This is the perfect-circle of self-pity and self-love: we deserve to be loved but we are hated because we are so wonderful.

The] crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from the 'heart of empire' to 'occupied colony'. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, colonizer and colonized. The dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony.

The quisling theme was also endemic in the revolt against black and Asian migrants. Immigration was proof that a treacherous elite was selling out the victory of the war. 'The white working class are redrawn,' as Schofield writes, 'as victims of a traitorous state… This was, he insisted, an invasion not unlike that which was threatened in 1940.

BMW means Brexit Made Wonderful.

With Brexit, England would experience the consequences of not being careful what you wish for.

On 18 May 2016, a month before the vote, Nigel Farage told the BBC 'it's legitimate to say that if people feel they have lost control completely – and we have lost control… then violence is the next step'.