Once upon a time in. Westminster | thearticle

This week the BBC’s political editor, Laura Kuenssberg, compared Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit strategy to the catchphrase of _Little Britain_ character Vicky Pollard: ‘yeah but, no but’. Mark

Spencer, the Conservative Chief Whip, released a picture of himself dressed as a Peaky Blinder. A Twitter account called ‘UKAssembleNow’ is promoting opponents of no-deal Brexit as Avengers,

Guardians of the Galaxy and Jedi Knights. And last week’s _Sunday Times_ featured a graphic in which the main characters of the Brexit drama are depicted as _Star Wars_ characters. Indeed,

referring to opponents of no-deal Brexit as the ‘Rebel Alliance’ – in reference to _Star Wars_ – is now mainstream. Is Brexit a Hollywood movie, a period drama, a satirical comedy – or all

three? Perhaps a more fitting comparison for British politics today is a Quentin Tarantino movie. After all, they both have zeitgeist quality, are surprisingly violent and don’t seem to end.

And the latest Tarantino flick, _Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood_, is set in a time and place quite similar to our own: late 1960s America. A time haunted by political assassinations? Check.

Generational and culture wars? Check. A population glued to their screens? Check. A political leader seen by many of his own people as a dictator? Check. Of course, the backdrop today, as

back then, is the spectre of a costly political war which, even in the event of a seemingly impossible victory, comes at great national cost. For the US in the 1960s, this was the Vietnam

War. For the UK today, it is Brexit. Public figures including the historian Richard Davenport-Hines and journalist Matthew d’Ancona have already made this comparison. Like the American war

effort in Vietnam, a Brexit solution which respects the Referendum and satisfies a majority of the population seems next to impossible. As prime minister, Boris Johnson has invoked the ‘can

do’ spirit of 1960s America and Dominic Cummings’s blog reveals his great admiration for that decade’s NASA space programme. Yet, despite the moon landing – and largely thanks to Vietnam –

America in the late 1960s was a time of assassinations, campus riots, mass protests, rebellious hippies and murderous cults. One can’t help but feel that Britain under Boris Johnson is more

akin to _the end_ of that decade than the optimism of the JFK era. An event which Tarantino’s film toys with is the brutal murder of the pregnant Hollywood actress Sharon Tate in 1969 by the

Manson Family, a cult group of mostly young, middle-class women who gave up their lives to live on a commune and follow the teachings of Charles Manson. To be sure, in Brexit we are yet to

see such insanity or brutality (though lest we forget the murder of Jo Cox in 2016), but the hysteria and anger are certainly there. As we keep seeing on the news, knife crime in London is

at an all-time high, and Home Office figures show that hate crimes have risen exponentially since 2016 across the country, while spending on MPs’ security more than doubled in 2017-18. The

screams from protestors by College Green, the picnicking Brexit protestors and the endless Twitter spats all demonstrate that we have plenty of rebels without a cause today too. And what

about how violent and deranged political language has become? Talk of ‘traitors’ and ‘backstabbing’ now seems meagre compared to the so-called ‘jihad on SpAds’, Rachel Johnson’s criticism of

her ‘Isis-like’ family, and Boris Johnson’s proclamation that he would rather ‘die in a ditch’ than delay Brexit. Just watch the ex-Blue Peter presenter Konnie Huq on _The Jeremy Vine

Show_, in which she asked a fellow guest whether they would still want Brexit ‘if the new term [of the deal] was that everyone’s head gets chopped off?’. British politics really has come to

resemble a Tarantino movie. The media revels in drama (don’t forget that Brexit sells papers and generates clicks), and our political class are more than happy to be the stars. The _Sunday

Times’s_ political editor, who called the paper’s account of the 2016 Referendum _All Out War_, recently polled Twitter for potential titles for his next instalment, to which several people

responded (including an MP) with ‘Armageddon’. _The Sun’s _political editor referred to the impasse in parliament this week as ‘trench warfare’. Even Jeremy Paxman has resorted to

profanities – his latest documentary is called ‘Why Are Our Politicians So Crap?’. The anger, the hysteria, the sense of impending doom – it really does feel like we’re living at the end of

a helter-skelter decade. In _Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood_, Hollywood actors fritter away their time while the Manson Family plot their murder. As film critic Robbie Collin put it: ‘we know

that these people are hurtling towards a reckoning, the whole town is hurtling towards a reckoning, but they don’t, they’re not aware of it’. As the clock ticks towards our ‘do or die’

moment, the same could be said of Brexit Britain. Of course, America did get back on its feet after the chaos of the 1960s, but only once it had finally withdrawn from Vietnam and its

president had resigned. The End?