The Festival of Brexit
The House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has decided that it doesn’t like the Festival of Brexit, aka Unboxed, which kicked off to general indifference earlier this month. It produced a damning report this week which concluded that the year-long celebration of British creativity was “vague and ripe for misinterpretation”. The £120m investment was, it said, “an irresponsible use of public money”, given the government’s own admission that it doesn’t know what Unboxed is for.
Unboxed is a series of 10 art projects with ambitious (if at times amorphous) aims such as sending music to the moon and back, transporting a North Sea oil rig to the beach at Weston-super-Mare and turning it into a multimedia centre, and asking people in Wales to imagine what life might be like in 2052. These are all no doubt admirable, inclusive and challenging, but it is fair to say they are somewhat removed from the Festival of Britain-type idea which Theresa May announced at the Conservative party conference in 2018 and which Brexit backers imagined would involve much flag-waving, consumption of bangers and mash, and replays of speeches by Churchill. You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way Brexiters’ assumptions have been upended.
The original notion was that the Festival of Brexit, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee and this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would come together in a glorious reforging of a newly confident nation. Some hope – with war in Ukraine, Covid still rampant, inflation approaching double digits and Brexit divisions far from healed. Julian Knight, chair of the DCMS committee and Tory MP for Solihull, complains that this three-pronged opportunity has been missed “There is no golden thread linking them all together,” he laments. But what he fails to realise is that a country’s elite cannot impose a national narrative. Politicians like to latch on to the sort of unifying “national traditions” which Eric Hobsbawm and others have exposed as bogus, and invest in grand projects such as the Millennium Dome which are supposed to underline national greatness and point the way forward. But such top-down impositions are doomed. TS Eliot hinted at that with his own banal list of cultural signifiers in his 1948 book Notes Towards the Definition of Culture: “a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar”. Eliot saw culture as organic and unpindownable, something he could barely grasp himself “except in flashes”. Leave golden threads and simple, deterministic national stories to dictators like Putin.
The Festival of Britain worked because it was a day out, an antidote to austerity. It captured a moment, but, for all its attempts to imagine the future, it didn’t encapsulate a culture. Danny Boyle had a good go at telling out “national story” in his widely admired Olympic opening ceremony in 2012 (symbol of a happier age), but even his pastoral-radical retelling was partial. What about the English civil war, the relationship with Ireland, empire, slavery, postwar decline? There is no golden thread; history is a contested mess that doesn’t lend itself to being boxed; it has to be suggestive, tangled, unresolved, unboxed. Which is why the anti-festival of Brexit will be admirably true to itself – and almost universally disliked or ignored by those who long for simple stories, linear narratives, easy resolutions.
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