What does it mean to win?

Brexit and Jutland show how winning battles can still mean losing wars

“The German fleet has assaulted its jailor, but it is still in jail.” This is how an American newspaper described the Battle of Jutland of 1916, an brutal naval battle against the British which the Germans claimed as a great victory.

Certainly, the Germans seemed to have the numbers on their side. As Robert Massie puts it in his book Castles of Steel,

Britain had lost fourteen ships (three battle cruisers, three armoured cruisers, and eight destroyers), while the German navy had lost eleven (one battle cruiser, one predreadnought battleship, four light cruisers, three armoured cruisers, and five destroyers). British casualties were much heavier: 6,768 men were killed or wounded, while the Imperial Navy lost 3,058.

Tactically and operationally, the German fleet had clearly won the battle, fighting it better in almost all respects against a numerically superior enemy.

However after scoring its punches, the Germans ran for home. The bruised jailor shut the bars again and the British blockade of the North Sea that was slowly strangling the Central Powers continued. British strategic dominance was unaffected. The High Seas Fleet could still not even reach the high seas.

Reading about Jutland reminded me of something I read about the North African campaign in World War II: a British tank crew member talking about the Brits’ early struggles against the German Afrika Korps. He said something along the lines of how even when the Brits felt they had had a good day, at the end of it the Germans invariably held the field on which the battle had been fought.

You may think you have won, while actually losing

Sport might seem rather more clear-cut, for there are absolute winners and losers. Even if a single game is drawn, the final league table shows who won and who lost out in the end. However even this can disguise deeper trends. A football club might concentrate all its efforts towards winning in the immediate present and sacrifice the future: retaining an aging team, failing to allow adequate recovery to injured players and running up debt in signing players they can’t afford unless their winning streak continues.

They may ultimately lose by winning.

Brexit as a Pyrrhic victory

In the political field, the phenomenon of the Pyrrhic victory should be familiar to Conservative and Brexit voters. You can win elections and referendums while the other side holds the field of politics: of how things get framed, of who appears shining in the light like a winner and who is scorned and harried as a loser.

In the case of Brexit, its supporters won the battle in 2016 in terms of winning the vote. However I think we can now say that they have lost the wider war of Brexit: both voters and campaigners have. Those who voted for it may still hold a candle, but for many it is burning out. And even if it’s not, nobody in power much cares that they’re holding it, except to manipulate them. Successive Tory governments have come and gone claiming to implement the vote while only attempting the odd push towards a ‘Global Britain’, a free-wheeling free trading entity detached from the desires of most voters and indeed from geopolitical and economic reality. The state and its leading institutions remains resolutely hostile, even openly campaigning it.

In the weeks and months following the vote, distraught Remain campaigners got themselves together, resolved to fight on and reshaped their campaigning organisations to do so. They faced an open door since almost all established power in Britain, in Europe and the wider Western world was on their side. For six and a half years, both on traditional and social media, they have dominated the framing of Brexit through constant repetition and denunciation of opponents (note for example how ‘Brexit’ trends on Twitter virtually every day even now, fuelled by excitable campaigners blaming anything and everything bad on it). Probably anyone in the world who knows a little bit about it will be familiar with this framing, of how Brexit and the British people who voted for it are economically illiterate and socially dubious too, at best.

The major institutions of British public life including the British state have encouraged this messaging and contributed to it – not least the Treasury, that centre of technocratic power. The messaging has spread far and wide, then coming back at us again time after time, recycled into external opinion.

If you want to see what it means to win in politics beyond the winning of democratic votes, look no further than the wider war of Brexit.

Presence rather than absence

I think Brexit shows that to win is to be present rather than absent, not just in physical terms but existentially. Just as you can hold a battlefield and enforce a blockade on your opponent physically, so you can do existentially. The criteria are pretty much the same. It’s about choosing when and how battles are fought, initiating activity and controlling territory, including the airwaves, social media and, extending off that, the private conversations and thoughts that help create our public identity.

I hope another example from WWI might help to illustrate this. In political charge of British naval operations, Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty put his operational leader Jackie Fisher as First Sea Lord under tremendous pressure to agree to his plan to ram a fleet through the Dardanelles and kick Turkey out of the war – an effort that led to the disastrous Gallipolli campaign.

Robert Massie writes,

Churchill admitted later, and Fisher often complained to friends about his inability to withstand these tactics. “He always out-argues me,” he said to one. And to another: “I am sure I am right. I am sure I am right, but he is always convincing me against my will. I hear him talk and he seems to make the difficulties vanish and when he is gone I sit down and write him a letter and say I agree. Then I go to bed and can’t sleep, and his talk passes away and I know I am right. So I get up and write him another letter and say I don’t agree, and so it goes on.”

Through Churchill’s erudition, power of argument and persistence, a man with no naval experience prevailed over someone with a lifetime of experience behind him. In an existential sense, he was the last man standing. He was holding the field at the end of the day, dictating terms to those who opposed him just like anti-Brexit campaigners have done over the past six years.

Of course, Churchill ended up losing. Following the failure of his Dardanelles operation, he was demoted and then resigned from government, going off to command a battalion on the Western Front. He went from being present as a winner to absent as a loser.

This cycle went on for the rest of his political life, which I guess this points to a deeper point about winning and losing: that it is not always final. Perhaps there is hope after all for battered Brexiteers?