In her classic study, Watching the English, first published in 2004, the anthropologist Kate Fox analysed the bonding rituals of her compatriots. She found that English men (though not English women), bond through what she called "the Mine's Better Than Yours game".
“‘Mine’, in this context, can be anything: a make of car, a football team, a political party, a holiday destination, a type of beer, a philosophical theory – the subject is of little importance. English men can turn almost any conversation, on any topic, into a Mine’s Better Than Yours game. I once listened to a 48-minute Mine’s Better Than Yours conversation (yes, I timed it) on the merits of wet-shaving versus electric razors.”
The absence of earnestness, even on the edge of disaster, has been astonishing
Essential to MBTY, Fox found, is “a mutual understanding that the differences of opinion are not to be taken too seriously”. To take umbrage and storm off in a huff would be incomprehensible. “The game is all about mock anger, pretend outrage, jokey one-upmanship . . . Earnestness is not allowed; zeal is unmanly; both are un-English and will invite ridicule.”
Crucially – and you can see where I’m going with this – “It is also universally understood that there is no way of actually winning the game. No one ever capitulates, or recognises the other’s point of view. The participants simply get bored or tired and change the subject, perhaps shaking their heads in pity at their opponents’ stupidity.”
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When future historians ask themselves how such an epoch-making event as the Brexit negotiations meandered on for 4½ years, circling around the same three issues, they will be sucked into a vortex of fish quotas, dynamic alignments and governance arrangements.
But none of this boring detail will really answer the question. For it is usually a good rule that the more boring the detail, the better the chance of agreement. Mandarins know the drill: blind everyone with technicalities and we all declare victory.
No single explanation for the extraordinary tardiness will work. But MBTY syndrome is as good as any other.
Jokey-but-serious one-upmanship so permeates Brexit discourse that it has crossed species into pandemic-speak: 'world-beating' Britain 'leading humanity's charge'
As I understand it from reading Fox, the game has three basic rules: the importance of not being earnest; a one-upmanship that presents itself as a joke but that has a hard edge of self-assertion; and the lack of interest in reaching a conclusion. The approach of British prime minister Boris Johnson’s regime to the Brexit negotiations meets all three tests.
The dominant linguistic mode of MBTY, says Fox, is “fake lightheartedness”. This, along with mock anger and pretend outrage, is Johnson’s USP. His mastery of phoney nonchalance is what so many of his compatriots love about him and what makes him the Maradona of Mine’s Better Than Yours. Hence Johnson singing Waltzing Matilda to his officials last Thursday evening as the talks broke down, to show he was ready for the “Australia-style” arrangement that is his empty euphemism for no deal at all.
The absence of earnestness, even on the edge of disaster, has been astonishing. The B-word has become unpronounceable. Johnson’s speech to the Tory Party conference in October had four glancing mentions of Brexit in four thousand words.
The British chancellor of the exchequer Rishi Sunak delivered his spending review last month without mentioning the fiscal effects of Brexit at all. This is very MBTY: the Brexit diversion has long-since reached the point where the participants "get bored or tired and change the subject".
This irritated insouciance is mirrored in the breathtaking refusal to prepare for the bureaucratic deluge: the 215 million additional customs declarations, the data systems needed to keep 220 million tonnes of freight flowing across the UK’s borders. Yawn.
Jokey-but-serious one-upmanship so permeates Brexit discourse that it has crossed species into pandemic-speak: “world-beating” Britain “leading humanity’s charge”.
It reached its zenith with education secretary Gavin Williamson’s claims, in relation to the US, France and Belgium, that “we’re a much better country than every single one of them”.
The third basic rule of MBTY – the impossibility of a conclusion – has always been fundamental to Brexit. It can’t ever finish. Its promise – that Britain would enjoy all the benefits of being in the EU without being a member – can never be fulfilled. The fantastical belief that sovereignty is unilateral, that post-imperial Britain can still set the terms on which it trades with the rest of the world, can never be reflected in reality.
Far from being, as Johnson’s election-winning slogan declared, “done”, the Brexit process is doomed to be perpetually undone. All of its fundamental assumptions – easiest trade deal ever, German car manufacturers calling the shots, we hold all the cards – unravelled. Even the withdrawal agreement that is actually “done” is reopened: oh gosh, we didn’t understand that stuff we signed.
This is why the trade talks have been dogged by mutual incomprehension. Instead of seriously mapping out a realistic future, the British side has been playing MBTY. But the EU neither understood nor cared about this game. It has been playing a different match, with entirely different objectives.
And the hard reality is that it is the EU that owns the pitch (the single market) and sets the rules. Britain ultimately has to decide whether it wants to play there or carry on with its own eccentric, inward and terminally inconclusive game.