On Saturday 7 September, prior to the suspension of parliament set for Monday 9 September, vocal groups of pro-Brexit marchers in Parliament Square clashed with protesters against prorogation and no-deal Brexit. The most visible of the pro-Brexiteers were the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA), counter-protestors to the March for Change group (in coalition with Another Europe is Possible, Momentum and the Green Party). According to reports, the anti-Brexit MP Anna Soubry was ‘too frightened‘ to speak to the rally because she was intimidated by the aggressive ‘Leave Now’ pro-Brexiteers, who marched through the crowd with St George cross and Union Jack flags, and banners demanding that the UK leave the EU on WTO rules – ie. with no deal. To boot, the self-styled ‘patriots’ were heard singing ‘We love you Boris Johnson, we do’ and calling their pro-European opponents ‘traitors’. In response, their adversaries led chants of ‘Nazi scum, off our streets’.
Some of the DFLA protestors were carrying a flag I was unfamiliar with – a white dragon on a red background. Via dubious online sources, I found that this white dragon flag had been revived by English nationalist groups wanting to re-establish the ‘white dragon’ standard in preference to the St George (‘dragon slayer’) cross, which is currently the official flag of England. In the narrative of these groups, the white dragon represents the victory of the Anglo-Saxons over their Celtic adversaries signified by the red dragon (now seen on the Welsh flag). The Saxons, Angles and Jutes are viewed (by nationalist groups) as the founders of England and touchstones for the fabled ‘pure’ English ‘identity’ that the DFLA and their kin seek to ‘liberate’ from EU ‘invaders’ in a nostalgic fantasy of reasserting a ‘sovereignty’ that never in fact existed. Clearly, the idea of a ‘pure race’ is rendered a nonsense by the intertwining of the different immigrant-settler groups (Saxons, Angles, Jutes) that nationalists adopt to signify their ‘pure blood’ against the ‘impurity’ of immigrants and EU ‘invaders’. Unlike the (post-Norman) St. George cross, English nationalists argue, the white dragon standard has no religious connotations (but I sense that the sectarian impulse remains, along with the ‘No Papists’ rallying cry of the Ulster Loyalists). One commentator (‘Britain is Radical’) questions the dubious historical origins of the white dragon (‘true ethnic English’) flag and surmises that (in recent times at least) it was adopted by a neo-Nazi group in the ’80s.
A source for the white dragon as symbolic of the Saxons is Arthurian legend, the body of medieval stories and romances centring on King Arthur. There is an account of a particular legend, sometimes called the ‘Prophecy of the Two Dragons’ or ‘The Prophecy of Merlin’, featuring a battle between a red and a white dragon, in which the white dragon is defeated. This is an extended quote from this account that outlines Merlin’s prophecy:
‘Vortigern’s Fortress
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, after the Treachery of the Long Knives, when the greater part of the nobility and leadership of the Britons had been brutally and treacherously murdered by Hengist and his Saxons, the wise men of King Vortigern, advised him to seek out a place where he might build a fortress as a place of safety to retreat to.
After searching what remained of his realm for a safe and suitable site he finally chose a rocky, wooded, hill about one mile from what is now called Beddgelert in Gwynedd, Wales, that rises to a height of about 250 feet above the valley of the River Glaslyn. This hill was once called Dinas Ffaraon Dandde or fortress of Fiery Pharaoh, and later became known as Dinas Emrys which means fortress of Ambrosius.
Thinking he has found a good site Vortigern gave the command for the work on building the walls of the fortress to commence. His builders worked hard building walls and towers in the daytime but no matter how far they progressed in a day, when they came back the next morning, they would find the previous day’s work in a heap on the ground. Although the builders used all their skills and knowledge and worked as hard as they possibly could during the day, each morning they would return to find the previous day’s work once again in a pile on the ground. This went on for many days until Vortigern was obliged to seek help from his wise men. According to Nennius, a 9th century monk and writer, his wise men informed him that that he would have to seek out a young boy “not conceived by a mortal man’. who would be sacrificed and his blood sprinkled in the mortar of the stonework in the hope of appeasing what ever dark power was hindering the construction of the fortress.
Myrddin Emrys
Vortigern sent his messengers out across the land seeking out such a boy. After many days and much searching, one of the messengers returned with a boy named Myrddin Emrys or Merlin Ambrosius, who was the only boy they could find “not conceived by a mortal man’.
Geoffrey of Monmouth in his book Historia regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain, 1137) says that Merlin was believed to have been the the son of an incubus or demon and his mother was mortal and was a nun. With the incubus representing Satan and the nun representing Jesus Christ, or God, he had been born from two opposing powers. As such he was said to have inherited the wisdom, knowledge and powers of both of these forces. He was brought before Vortigern who told him the fate he intended to inflict upon him. Geoffrey says,
“A meeting took place the next day for the purpose of putting him to death. Then the boy said to the king, “Why have your servants brought me hither?’ “That you may be put to death,’ replied the king, “and that the ground on which my citadel is to stand, may be sprinkled with your blood, without which I shall be unable to build it.‘
However, according to Geoffrey, Merlin was not intimidated by Vortigern. Instead, he spoke with power and authority, demanding to know where he had got this idea from. He then declared to Vortigern he would reveal the real reason why the construction of the fortress was unsuccessful.
‘The Prophecy of the Two Dragons
‘Geoffrey of Monmouth then gives the following account of Merlin’s interview with Vortigern and his wise men,
“Who,’ said the boy, “instructed you to do this?’ “My wise men,” answered the king. “Order them hither,’ returned the boy; this being complied with, he thus questioned them: “By what means was it revealed to you that this citadel could not be built, unless the spot were previously sprinkled with my blood? Speak without disguise, and declare who discovered me to you;’ then turning to the king, “I will soon,’ said he, “unfold to you every thing; but I desire to question your wise men, and wish them to disclose to you what is hidden under this pavement:’ they acknowledging their ignorance, “there is,’ said he, “a pool; come and dig:’ they did so, and found the pool. “Now,’ continued he, “tell me what is in it;’ but they were ashamed, and made no reply. “I,’ said the boy, “can discover it to you: there are two vases in the pool;’ they examined, and found it so: continuing his questions,’ What is in the vases?’ they were silent: “there is a tent in them,’ said the boy; “separate them, and you shall find it so;’ this being done by the king’s command, there was found in them a folded tent. The boy, going on with his questions, asked the wise men what was in it? But they not knowing what to reply, “There are,’ said he, “two serpents, one white and the other red; unfold the tent;’ they obeyed, and two sleeping serpents were discovered; “consider attentively,’ said the boy, “what they are doing.’ The serpents began to struggle with each other; and the white one, raising himself up, threw down the other into the middle of the tent, and sometimes drove him to the edge of it; and this was repeated thrice. At length the red one, apparently the weaker of the two, recovering his strength, expelled the white one from the tent; and the latter being pursued through the pool by the red one, disappeared. Then the boy, asking the wise men what was signified by this wonderful omen, and they expressing their ignorance, he said to the king,“I will now unfold to you the meaning of this mystery. The pool is the emblem of this world, and the tent that of your kingdom: the two serpents are two dragons; the red serpent is your dragon, but the white serpent is the dragon of the people who occupy several provinces and districts of Britain, even almost from sea to sea: at length, however, our people shall rise and drive away the Saxon race from beyond the sea, whence they originally came; but do you depart from this place, where you are not permitted to erect a citadel; I, to whom fate has allotted this mansion, shall remain here; whilst to you it is incumbent to seek other provinces, where you may build a fortress.‘
Merlin then explained that the problems with the construction were actually caused by the two sleeping dragons waking up and fighting each other. He explained the Red Dragon represented the defenders of Britain which although exhausted and appearing defeated would eventually rise up and repulse the White Dragon of the invading Anglo-Saxons. He told of the coming of Arthur who he referred to as the Boar of Cornwall which would be the emblem on his banner and prophesied that six kings descended from Arthur would rule before the Anglo-Saxons returned to rule over Britain.
For the defenders of [Celtic] Britain the prophecy of the two dragons was a momentous event, giving hope and inspiration for those who lived in those times to carry on the fight and was an important moment in the destiny of Britain and he went on to make further prophecies concerning the future of Britain beyond Arthur’s time.’
From Geoffrey of Monmouth ‘Historia Regum Brittaniae’ The History of the Kings of Britain, Book VII, Chapter III (12th century):
‘Woe to the red dragon, for his banishment hasteneth on. His lurking holes shall be seized by the white dragon, which signifies the Saxons whom you invited over; but the red denotes the British nation, which shall be oppressed by the white. Therefore shall its mountains be levelled as the valleys, and the rivers of the valleys shall run with blood. The exercise of religion shall be destroyed, and churches be laid open to ruin. At last the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners.’
Medievalists keen to dispel the myth of a ‘pure white’ Middle Ages have noted the use of Celtic symbolism by American white supremacists seen, for example, at the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. According to Karen Overby, ‘[f]or white supremacists, medieval Europe is a fantasy of white culture and the source of an imagined, pure heritage. This is a dangerous view of a whites-only Middle Ages, a Middle Ages located primarily in England, Ireland, and Western Europe, with fair-skinned royals and valiant knights defending the borders against threats to that homogeneity’. Sierra Lomuto argues that ‘[w]e are allowing the Middle Ages to be seen as a preracial space where whiteness can locate its ethnic heritage.’ Writing after Charlottesville, Dorothy Kim is unequivocal on this point when she challenges fellow medievalists to interrogate ‘our old-style position’ of ‘objectivist neutrality’ that ignores deployment of medieval symbolism by ‘white supremacists/white nationalists/KKK/Nazis’:
‘Let us be crystal clear here—medieval studies is intimately entwined with white supremacy and has been so for a long time. Feel free to ask historians of 19th-century Confederate history, the KKK, and the Nazis. They will produce reams of bibliography, material culture, documents, images, etc. for your perusal. Let us be even clearer on this second point: white supremacy is not fringe. This is not a peripheral, tiny subculture problem.’
She also notes that: ‘[a]s Catherine Cox recently presented at MLA, ISIS/ISIL also weaponizes the idea of the pure medieval Islamic past in their recruiting rhetoric for young male Muslims’.
The story of Merlin’s prophecy could bear further interpretation, but here I merely want to highlight the fantasy of a homogeneous identity promulgated by the image of the battle between the red and the white dragon. Clearly (albeit a characteristic conveniently forgotten by white supremacist groups adopting such symbolism) both the represented groups were already intertwined conglomerations of various cultural and ethnic identities. Yet such definitive drawing of the borderlines between identities seeps into the rhetoric of the so-called Brexit divide – the psychology of ‘us’ and ‘them’ inscribed in the pro- and anti-Brexit protests of 7 September and the movement towards the more extreme positions of either leaving the UK with no deal (‘no surrender’!) or revoking Article 50 altogether.
Additionally, the Merlin prophecy emphasises the settler-colonial context of Britain, with the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes representing just the latest wave of colonial domination, a situation that Merlin is able to fantasise about a future reversal when ‘the oppressed shall prevail, and oppose the cruelty of foreigners’ – the colonized (under Rome) who have become the colonizer may yet revert to the status of the colonized… and so the power play between the dominant and the dominated goes on.
Moving to the modern context, Etienne Balibar discusses how we might conceive of Europe as a ‘borderland’. He calls one of the (four) patterns that he uses to describe this condition ‘crossover’, ‘overlapping folds’ or ‘Nappes superposées‘. He writes that:
There is no ‘centre’; there are only ‘peripheries’. Or, better said, each region of Europe is or could be considered a ‘centre’ in its own right, because it is made of overlapping peripheries, each of them open (through ‘invasions’, ‘conquests’, ‘refuges’, ‘colonizations’ and ‘postcolonial migrations’, etc) to influences from all other parts of Europe, and from the whole world. This creates a potential for ethnic and religious conficts, but also for hybridity and cultural invention. […] It is impossible to represent Europe’s history as a story of pure identities, running the danger of becoming progressively alienated.
Etienne Balibar, ‘Europe as Borderland’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2009, volume 27, pp. 190-215, p. 200.
This ‘progressive alienation’ (as opposed to what Balibar calls ‘constructed identities, dependent on a series of successive encounters between “civilisations” ‘) is relevant to the ‘alienation’ groups like the DFLA want to claim for themselves in combination with what Balibar calls the ‘production of the foreigner [or stranger]’. (p. 204) How the foreigner/stranger was constituted or ‘produced’ by the Brexit campaigners is of course highly significant to the production of the subsequent ‘Brexit divide’.
During the 2016 Brexit campaign Nigel Farage, on behalf of Ukip, unveiled a poster with an image of a large queue of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border in 2015. The slogan on this piece of propaganda was ‘Breaking Point’, with the subheadings ‘The EU has failed us all’ and ‘We must break free of the EU and take back control’. The image was deliberately chosen not only underline an anti-immigration message pandering to racist sentiment but also to illustrate the supposed effects of Angela Merkel’s 2015 ‘open door’ policy, which was the German government’s response to the extraordinary numbers of people fleeing war in Syria at the time. Temporarily suspending some of the terms of the Dublin Regulation, Merkel decided to welcome unregistered asylum seekers no matter which European country they had first entered. Farage’s conflation of the ‘foreign threat’ and Merkel’s policy signalled not only the racist tenor of Ukip’s campaign, but also gave contour to the rhetoric that poses the EU as a German-led foreign ‘invader’ threatening the ‘sovereignty’ of a beleagured Britain (or maybe ‘England’), in defense of which Farage and his ilk fashion themselves as ‘patriots’ determined to pull up the barricades. Fintan O’Toole has written about such paranoid fantasies in his book Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain and here , where he draws the connection between the Brexiteers warped perspective on the EU and ‘alternative history’ narratives such as Len Deighton’s bestselling thriller SS-GB, which imagines Britain’s surrender to and occupation by Germany at the end of WWII. Brexit rhetoric includes the projection that Britain is (or will become) a ‘vassal state’ (thanks Jacob Rees-Mogg for that wee gem, a lexical oddity that mirrors the medieval context of Merlin’s prophecy). O’Toole quotes Boris Johnson, from an article in the Telegraph on 12 November 2018, stating that ‘we are on the verge of signing up for something even worse than the current constitutional position. These are the terms that might be enforced on a colony’. ‘We seem to be on the verge of total surrender’, Johnson blusters in the same article. These hysterical anti-EU language infusions have been rampant, with pro-EU types being dubbed ‘quislings’ and ‘betrayers’ of Britain. During the lead up to the 2016 referendum, the official Vote Leave campaign attempted to distance themselves from Ukip’s overtly racist rhetoric, yet Johnson (one of the Vote Leave campaign’s figureheads) repeatedly referred to the ‘threat’ of Turkey’s planned membership of the European Union (which he later went on to deny), implying that this would result in mass migration from Turkey to the UK (even though Turkey’s entrance to the EU is highly unlikely). Vote Leave produced a poster with the slogan ‘Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU. Vote Leave – Take Back Control’. The campaign group added further fuel to the fire of racial prejudice by implying that this would pose a ‘security threat‘ – the mythical Turkish immigrants were demonised as gun-wielding criminals. A Vote Leave spokesperson claimed that: ‘Since the birthrate in Turkey is so high, we can expect to see an additional million people added to the UK population from Turkey alone within eight years’. Michael Gove stacked up the odds even further by claiming that the accession of five new countries into the EU – Turkey, Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia – would place pressure on the NHS: ‘The idea of asking the NHS to look after a new group of patients equivalent in size to four Birminghams is clearly unsustainable‘, he argued. In this way, the Vote Leave Campaign constructed the two keystones of their argument for quitting the EU: putting the frighteners on by producing fear of an invasion of dodgy ‘johnny foreigner’ and selling the lie that leaving the EU would provide the NHS with an additional £350 million. Chaos-monger and all round bully boy (Vote Leave campign director and now goverment advisor) Dominic Cummings is quoted as saying (on 9 January 2017): ‘If Boris, Gove and Gisela [Stuart, Vote Leave’s chair] had not supported us and picked up the baseball bat marked ‘Turkey/NHS/£350m’ with five weeks to go, then 650,000 votes might have been lost.’
The world of Brexit provides a wide-open window into such schoolground antics, the likes of which cultivates the ground of a dumb-headed ‘us’ v ‘them’ politics and uncomfortable nationalist rhetoric unwilling to admit a more complex set of categories for citizenship and neighbourliness across Europe.
The Monday (9 September) following the Parliament Square protests was the day set for the contested prorogation. The Benn bill (in Johnson’s rhetoric, the ‘surrender bill’) blocking a no-deal Brexit received Royal Assent. Speaker of the House John Bercow announced his intention to stand down from his post on 31 October. The Commons also passed a bill demanding the release of government documents on their plans for a no-deal Brexit and prorogation. Number 10 indicated that it intended to resist both demands. In the evening, a poorly attended and rather desultory Northern Ireland debate took place, reflecting the government’s cavalier attitude towards upholding the tenets of the Good Friday agreement. Nothing much seems to have changed here since the 1980s: Commenting on a 1984 session on the New Ireland Forum in the House of Commons, William Shannon remarked in 1986 that ‘as usual most members of Parliament chose a debate on Northern Island as the time to go answer their mail or have a drink with a constituent’ (cited in Diarmaid Ferriter, The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics. London: Profile Books, 2019, p. 115). MPs piled back into the House to listen to Boris Johnson’s demands for a snap election, again another ‘people vs parliament’ diatribe in which Johnson claimed that his government ‘will not allow the emphatic verdict of the referendum to be slowly suffocated by further draft and paralysis’. Jeremy Corbyn responds by telling Johnson that ‘This government is a disgrace’. On Johnson’s sixth parlimentary defeat in as many days, MPs voted to block the election. Opposition MPs made clear that the terms of the election should not be dictated by Johnson until a no-deal Brexit was taken off the table.
And so to the prorogation of Parliament. The Usher of the Black Rod, an office of medieval origins, enters the Commons around 1:30am on Tuesday 10 September. John Bercow expresses his discontent with the extraordinary suspension of parliament, calling it an ‘act of executive fiat‘. Before Bercow is able to exit his chair to go to the House of Lords to formalize prorogation proceedings, a group of opposition MPs, carrying signs saying ‘silenced’ tried to prevent the Speaker from leaving. (On at least one occasion, in March 1629, Members managed to delay a prorogation by holding the Speaker down in his chair and locking the doors of the House). Reluctantly, Bercow carries out his duty, with only the government and DUP MPs in tow. Opposition benches remain packed throughout the proceedings, and afterwards Tory MPs fail to return to the Commons, as is customary. It marks the end of a long and rancorous evening.
Bercow’s disdain for the extraordinary prorogation was supported by The Supreme Court on 24 September in response to appeals from the High Court of England and Wales and the Inner House of the Court of Session in Scotland. The High Court of England and Scotland had decided that the challenge to the lawfulness of prorogation was not justiciable in a court of law. The Scottish courts, on the other hand, had judged that the issue was justiciable, and that the suspension had been motivated by, as Lady Hale, President of the Justices of the Supreme Court, stated in her summary judgement, ‘the improper purpose of stymying Parliamentary scrutiny of the Government’. The 11 Justices of the Supreme Court, in essence, agreed with this judgement. In her summary of the Supreme Court judgement, Lady Hale concluded that: ‘the Prime Minister’s advice to Her Majesty was unlawful, void and of no effect. This means that the Order in Council to which it led was also unlawful, void and of no effect and should be quashed. This means that when the Royal Commissioners walked into the House of Lords it was as if they walked in with a blank sheet of paper. The prorogation was also void and of no effect. Parliament has not been prorogued. This is the unanimous judgement of all 11 Justices’.
Parliament had been unlawfully suspended for eleven days.
