In Defence of Remoaners

As Britain slides further and further into the kind of desaturated dystopia that was always our destiny, the whinge is becoming our last line of defence. Trains are always delayed, kids are feral and terrifying, rats gnawed off your leg, come and have a moan if you think you're sad enough.

But lately, moaning has somehow acquired bad connotations. The Brexit brigade have discovered a new favourite word for people who don't agree with them: we're Remoaners, sore losers who can't stop whingeing even once the national will has clearly expressed itself, bitter and miserable old grouches who keep on ruining the autumn optimism of a newly assertive Britain with our constant jeremiads and doom-mongering.

It's an admirably efficient way to shut down any opposition to a genuinely fanatical programme: this is just meaningless griping from a few people who simply refuse to be happy.

You think Parliament should have some oversight on an EU withdrawal that was, let's not forget, intended to restore full sovereignty to Parliament? Quit Remoaning.

You're worried that the government's increasingly thuggish measures against migration will not just set us up for a long economic decline, but are conveniently identifying migrants as a hapless scapegoat to bear the brunt of every problem caused by their repression? Stop being so miserable!

Britain is in the grip of a shuddering manic episode – mad, deaf, charging out on its last ever rampage, its sunny optimism turning to a fang-laced snarl as soon as anyone dares to doubt that everything will be great forever. Newspapers demand that quibblers be silenced; a Tory councillor has set up a petition calling for those who support continued EU membership to be punished under the treason act – and while he's since been suspended by his local party, Downing Street's response has been muted, declaring only that "different people will choose their words differently". You can't just say hang them all, not when you're a respectable politician, but it's what they're thinking. No grumbling, no whining, no negative energies: we might be pitching ourselves into the abyss, but we'll do it with a smile on our faces.

It couldn't be coming from stranger people. The Mail loves to talk about Remoaners; so does the Sun, the Express, the Telegraph, all media bastions of a right-wing politics that has for decades consisted almost entirely of one long whinge against the modern world. The same Daily Mail front page that bore the lurid "Damn the unpatriotic Bremoaners" banner was mostly devoted to an extended grumble about HS2. The whine has been echoing around the fringes of this country for a very long time: things aren't how they used to be, there's no respect any more, everything's expensive, they're trying to turn Christmas into Winterval, there are Muslims and gays and cyclists and any number of incomprehensible tribes edging their way to my doorstep. Things aren't exactly as I want them to be, and I hate it. What were all the months of complaining about banana-straightening Eurocrats before the referendum if not moaning? If moaning means a refusal to accept the decision, any decision, is anyone innocent but the dead?

That people are sometimes guilty of hypocrisy, that they'll condemn behaviour in others that they engage in themselves, isn't exactly an earth-shattering revelation. But it's worth thinking about the semiosis of this whole process, the way that the signifier "moaning" and its shadowy twin "reasonable concerns" orbit obscurely around one another, dragging concepts and struggles into their orbits. People have reasonable concerns about the Islamisation of Europe or gangs of drug-crazed teenagers murdering their families, fantasies of things that aren't really happening; they moan about the nakedly fascist rhetoric percolating through all the layers of power into popular consciousness, as it drips in miserable globs all around us. To accuse someone of moaning about something requires a shared understanding that the object actually exists; the moaners are the ones who are uncomfortably correct.

But there's something else: the worry from the right wing isn't just that the Remoaners are ruining everyone's giddy suicidal fun by pointing out that we're making a terrible mistake, but that they might be able to act to disrupt the process. The worry is that they're doing something.

Good whingeing, the whingeing of the reactionaries, is impotent, a steady grumble against all that exists, only sometimes erupting into praxis at pre-arranged dates for elections and referenda.

Bad whingeing is the type that's active in identifying a problem and seeking independently to fix it. When rail workers go on strike they tend to be figured as moaners, griping about lost jobs or reduced pay, instead of just getting on with their jobs like everyone else. Feminist campaigners are entitled, fussy, and unpatriotic to boot; don't they realise how much worse people have it in Saudi Arabia?

Every action to improve conditions starts with a complaint against how they currently are. If this is moaning, the best we could do is embrace it. Only moaning can bring about a better world.

@sam_kriss

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