Liars, fakers and Jeremy Corbyn

Last week’s Supreme Court act of judicial alchemy crashed into, and killed off, the Labour Party conference — just as it was getting interesting. Labour’s Remain ascendancy had been given an attitude adjustment by the leadership. By a show of hands, the Keir Starmer tendency was defeated in its attempt to make the party’s position explicitly one of Remain. The Starmer types objected that the vote had actually gone the other way, but had been overturned by fiat.

Sometimes satire writes itself. Perhaps Labour Remain could go to the Supreme Court and argue that, like prorogation, this was an event that never happened in the first place? The metaphysics of our current situation are not entirely clear. But I digress.

On Brexit, it seems, Jeremy Corbyn is not yet ready to abandon the constructive ambiguity that animates (or perhaps anaesthetises) his own mind. The left hemisphere, which argues “Eurosceptic”, has not yet been overwhelmed by the right hemisphere, which urges him to yield to the Remain fanatics who sit inconveniently on his front bench. Last week’s vote shows little more than that the cognitive tension remains alive.

Corbyn, we are constantly being told, is a long-time Eurosceptic whose views were shaped by his mentor, Tony Benn. His willingness to be pulled into a shape defined by Emily Thornberry must (we are also told) be a result of an expedient electoral calculation. I suspect that this is not the whole story. There is something in the way that the Remain fanatics have conducted themselves that flirts with the Marxism that is embedded deep in Comrade Corbyn’s soul.

In 2016 the Remain side conceded the result of the vote, but refused to relinquish control of its subsequent implementation. It saw that to seize the language of a debate is to seize its outcome. New terms were invented. A seismic vote will, inevitably, be ambiguous in its consequences. It therefore shifted the ambiguities to centre-stage and framed them within this useful set of neologisms.

This is all straight from the Marxist playbook: when you control language, you control thought. It’s the strategy of all the groups in which Corbyn has placed his unrequited love, from the IRA to Hamas. Grab the language; determine the outcome.

That’s the Remain strategy and from the point of view of Corbyn, what’s not to like? And the strategy came alive in vivid form last week in the Commons. The details of this need not detain us, as they have been extensively reported elsewhere. But this much is now clear: that the most histrionic Remainers have become guilty of something worse than lying. They have developed enforcement mechanisms, predicated on grievance, designed to police a form of dishonesty that goes beyond mere lying. They have become fakers.

Some years ago the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote a paper (later published as a short book) called (seriously) On Bullshit. He draws a conceptual distinction between lying and faking. The liar, he argues, must have some sort of concern for the truth (how else can he be successful?). The faker recognises no such constraints. The faker puts himself on display. Whether or not something happens to be true is of little matter to him. He just wants to get his way.

But the problem with faking (as opposed to lying) is that when you detach yourself from considerations of truth, you end up deceiving yourself as well. We have obligations, not merely of action, but of feeling. In his Ethics Aristotle defends anger as an appropriate response to a real injustice. The “appropriate” bit happens when the anger is proportionate, rightly-directed and time-limited. Otherwise it devolves into rage. Rage is self-indulgent; it is therefore unethical. You’re not entitled to feel the way you do simply because you feel the way you do. There is such a thing as a proper calibration of the soul.

The likes of Barry Sheerman and Anna Soubry wish to confiscate the language of the Brexit debate and replace it with announcements of their own anger. But because of the confiscation the anger should be redefined as “rage”. They are genuine in their rage, but their rage is not a genuine emotion. It is fake, whether they know it or not.

When the Prime Minister is told that he “cannot” use words like “surrender” because the language is “offensive” he should, as a matter of urgency, apologise for any real offence and then use the word again. And again. Gratifyingly, this seems to be what he is doing.

Incidentally, Professor Frankfurt’s essay draws on an earlier paper by the analytical philosopher Max Black, On the Prevalence of Humbug.

Plus ca change! As Dominic Grieve might put it.