Voltaic Brexit 1
I haven’t mentioned Brexit much because I don’t know enough about it; I know only what I’ve read in the papers.
It’s not that I fear displaying my ignorance; it’s that I don’t even have enough ignorance to display. (I will say that my gut instinct is that, in a globalizing world, promoting parochialism is not a propitious proposition.)
I will commend to your attention to the latest episode of the Bad Voltage podcast, which opens with a fascinating discussion about Brexit amongst one Brit living in Britain, one expat Brit, and one American, all of them accomplished and none of them political professionals. The Brexit discussion takes up the first half-hour or so of the show.
July 16, 2016 at 6:21 pm
Wow, I listened to that and got the same impression I had the day after the vote when all the US betters in the newspapers couldn’t understand how it had happened and the only people doing the analyses where those who’d benefited from globalization.
Which was basically, everyone in the Leave vote was misinformed, they were lied to by their leaders, and they were xenophobes. And that just wasn’t the entire story.
I found it remarkable that right at the beginning , the American-sounding guy is expressing disbelief that you could have such a vote without nailing it to the requirement of a “super-majority.” Which is fundamentally an unselfconscious elitist jerkoff statement.
Plus, you have the commentator, the jolly guy vacationing in New York, when if you went out to look at some of the demographic slices that resoundingly rejected staying in the EU, these were people who couldn’t do such things. They hadn’t enjoyed anything of the new order, their communities and towns had stagnated an fallen backwards, and they were often fully aware that what they were doing probably wouldn’t help them economically. And all of it was frequently seen through the prism of foreign influx in which those who the government has chosen to do nothing for, to marginalize, see their opportunities being further damaged by cheap foreign labor and refugees even when that other class has not really benefited, either. And so this was largely a conscious decision to give the finger to the establishment and it worked. Cameron’s Tory government has fallen and Labour was also damaged. The venal ex-mayor of London who was thought to be in-line to be the next PM did not reap any benefit and was forced out of the discussion. And the head of UKIP, also central to the Leave campaign has not seen a great deal of benefit to his interest, either.
This was a backlash consequence, one the betters, for want of a better description, just can’t fathom. Just as they can’t fathom Trump and his legion here.
As for the British pound and economy being ruint, it’s way too early for the autopsy.
Spend decades hosing and demonizing the working class as well as others in an economy that is seen, in this instance, as serving only the City of London. Not a big surprise that things like this happen.