Brexit, revolutionary parallels and the "Batman" analogy

Some commentators have called Brexit a kind of "revolution"; this blogger has referred to it in the past as a kind of "coup by stealth", and there is plenty of evidence to support this view. A small faction of one party, supported by actors outside of the official political process, hijacked the machinery of state to enact their own narrow agenda, regardless of the lack of popular support for it in the population. Under the colours of UKIP, what was initially thought of as a kind of "popular uprising" in the ballot box, has transformed into an agenda that seeks to destroy almost everything most people recognise about the modern British civilisation. In this sense, to use that common lamentation: the revolution had been betrayed! Those that saw leaving the EU as an opportunity to make Britain a more just nation were always bound to be left disillusioned in the face of much more powerful interests that wished to use Brexit for their own amoral purposes.

It was always bound to be so.
The author has long been a fan of the director Christopher Nolan, in particular his take on the "Batman" story and its symbolism. In the guise of the Joker, Nolan created a persona that was the archetypal anarchic, nihilistic psychopath. In the wider story of the "League Of Shadows" that appeared in the first and last of the "Dark Knight" trilogy, Nolan had created a narrative of a secret group that wished to use Gotham as a moral lesson on the rest of the world, where its moral decay would be "purged". In sense, as explained in the video here (talking about the character Bane in particular), Nolan takes the many historical lessons and examples from past revolutions such as the Jacobins in France or the Bolsheviks in Russia. Others have compared Nolan's narrative in "The Dark Knight Rises" to the contemporaneous "Occupy" movement, though Nolan himself said this was just coincidental; he simply uses characters like Bane to explain how revolutionary ideas and rhetoric have always been used as instruments against perceived moral corruption, and how the "cure" has always turned out to be worse than the "disease".
The story of the "The Dark Knight Rises" is also a case-study in how interest groups (such as Wayne's business rival, the industrialist, Daggett) can inadvertently become vehicles for extremist agendas (such as Bane's). Brexit is simply a real-life example of the same commonly-found narrative.


"It doesn't matter who we are. What matters is our plan"

The anti-European movement in Britain had been a vehicle for political change since the Maastricht Treaty of twenty-five years ago. This had brought together a variety of people with different ideologies, and it should not be forgotten that when Britain first joined the then-EEC it was the Labour Party that was most skeptical about greater ties with Europe; this view only changed gradually, until the roles had been reversed with the Tories by the time of the Maastricht Treaty. This meant that, although it was usually right-wing Libertarians who were making most of the running on the anti-Europe agenda (and were the ones behind the creation of UKIP), there were still other elements that were attracted to the cause for their own reasons, who blamed the EU for their woes.
The rise of UKIP from a fringe movement twenty years ago to one that (for a while) dominated the political agenda can be explained by the deliberate diffuseness of its appeal. It was Nigel Farage's charisma that held the party together and saw it appeal to greater numbers of the disillusioned. At one point referring to his party as a "People's Army", Farage appeared as the ultimate anti-establishment figure, even though he was a privately-educated man of "The City" with a strongly Libertarian agenda.
The fact that Brexit's Libertarian agenda has outlasted the political fortunes of Farage and UKIP tells us about how the movement has become much more than about one man or one party. To paraphrase the Bane quote at the head of the paragraph, it doesn't matter who's in charge of Brexit; what matters is Brexit. As long as Brexit is carried out, nothing else matters. This is what makes Brexit seem more and more like an ideological kind of "suicide pact", that ought to be implemented no matter what, regardless of the cost to everyone else. For their moralistic version of purity to be reached, the corrupt status quo must be purged, even if they destroy Britain as we know it in the process. Maybe that's one reason why some wags refer to the ideologues as the "Brexit Taliban". They have a plan, and they can't be reasoned with.

"Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you"

Brexit was only possible because of years of political complacency from the establishment. David Cameron, in an act of supreme arrogance, assumed that he would easily win a referendum on the EU, and thus put the issue of Europe to bed for a generation at least. In being part of the EU for more than forty years, the pro-EU establishment had considered the arguments for being a member of the EU to be virtually self-evident. Since the defeat of the Tory "bastards" in parliament during the Maastricht Treaty debate, the issue of the EU had been settled for twenty years. They were thus were ill-prepared against an opposing side that not only had the better rhetoric, but also were better organised and had greater self-belief. Like the Bane quote at the head of the paragraph, the establishment had forgotten how to fight for their ideas.
In the "Dark Knight" trilogy, Bruce Wayne symbolises establishment values, but by the time Bane and his revolutionary agenda appear on the scene, he is unprepared, and is defeated by Bane (at least temporarily). This can be seen, on a one-on-one scale, as an analogy for all populist and extremist movements that have threatened the established order. In the past, they were movements such as Bolshevism and Fascism, but in the modern era, these movements have been personified across the world in different parts of Europe and Asia through populist "strongman" regimes and ideological agendas. They have only been allowed to flourish due to the weakness and complacency of the existing order.


"Do you feel in charge?"

Once the referendum was won, Theresa May took political control of the process by becoming an acolyte to the cause. After first of all taking the Conservative Party into the same realm as UKIP in the party conference, this then resulted in not long afterwards declaring that the UK would also leave the single market and customs union. It should be remembered that few of the leave campaigners actually were calling for this during the referendum campaign; they saw no reason to leave the single market in itself, as they saw it would damage Britain's economy. However, as Nolan's narrative in "The Dark Knight Returns" demonstrates, the agenda of one cause can quickly become mutated into a more extreme "pure" version. So, after the referendum May's government became enthralled by the agenda of "Hard Brexit", whereby the people with the real power behind events made their presence felt.
This is how interest groups like "Legatum" (and the ERG in parliament) have become the people really running the government's Brexit agenda. While how, using the quote in the heading above, Bane mocks Daggett to demonstrate who's really in control of Gotham, it is in real-life the "moneyed interests" in Brexit who have the final say, who look at those disparate, amateurish groups that naively supported the referendum campaign with such disdain. UKIP had its moment in the spotlight, but was really nothing more than a pawn, a vessel, that the "moneyed interests" could use to get what they wanted; once it had served its purpose, it could be discarded like political trash, and has been. Nolan demonstrated this point in the film with how Bane dealt so casually with Daggett, whose money and infrastructure had been so important for him, until they weren't. The Bolsheviks in 1917 Russia dealt with the short-lived Liberal Kerensky government in much the same way, overthrowing it once it had ceased to be useful.


"Take control of your city!"

In "The Dark Knight", Bane sees himself as Gotham's "reckoning", to put a definitive end to the city's moral degradation. As all revolutions may be called a sort of "reckoning", Brexit has been seen by some of its advocates as a similar kind of moral "reckoning". It is seen as an opportunity to reset the agenda and put right many of Britain's wrongs. The fact that such thinking is naive at best is immaterial. Britain has many things wrong with it, but a "reckoning" is not the right way to go about it, especially when there are so many opportunists who are more interested in using the potential chaos for their own ends. Some might welcome the possibility of the system collapsing around them, but most of those that do are not doing so for altruistic reasons.
The "reckoning" that Bane presents in "The Dark Knight Rises" is a false revolution, not with greater morality but with even worse immorality. He explains this to Bruce Wayne; how Bane would offer hope to poison the city's soul, by letting them doing absolutely anything they wanted. In this way, Nolan succeeds in getting to the core of all failed revolutions: they offer freedom but create even greater oppression than before; it is simply of a different nature. This is the hideous irony of the "Brexit Agenda", and how it simply seems to take the ideology of "austerity" to its logical, amoral conclusion. Libertarianism isn't freedom in the "civilised" sense of the word, but merely "freedom" in the sense that you are "free" to fend for yourself, thanks to absolute government indifference to your fate. It is a "freedom" that allows homeless people to die on the street, disabled people to go hungry, and health system to collapse. To outsiders looking on, it might look less like "freedom" and more like a descent to a moral abyss.

While the agenda of Brexit has rhetorically shifted ever harder, this has been matched with a populist rhetoric that has no modern parallel in Britain. The way that the Brexit rhetoric of "Take back control" (as well as how Trump's) mirrors with that of Bane is striking, and tells us how well Nolan as a writer can see the universality of revolutionary themes. To its advocates, Brexit is the instrument of Britain's salvation, to extract itself from the rule of a corrupt elite. To those opposed to it - "Remainers" - it is a false idol.
The kind of "freedom" that the Brexiteers advocate is one where Britain is an island legally "untethered" from cross-national commitments; not only the EU, but a swathe of other associated legal treaties that Britain needs to be signed up to in order to function as a 21st century global power. The image from "The Dark Knight Rises", where the bridges to Gotham are all destroyed (bar one), seems a startlingly apt metaphor for the "burning the bridges" rhetoric that the Brexiteers seem to have in mind. It would not only cut Britain off from its closest trading market, but also (thanks to losing all the associated EU trade deals) make it much harder to trade with most of the world. It would do huge damage to Britain's reputation as a reliable nation to do business with, as well as cause unprecedented disruption to Britain's own internal economy.

This is what the Brexiteers mean by "taking back control".