On July 1st The Financial Times concluded that the Brexit result was a Pyrrhic victory for Boris Johnston but this mad and unnecessary referendum, forged on foundations of deceit, self-agrandisement and opportunism, has huge potential to be a Pyrrhic victory for every man and woman who voted to leave.
We hear mealy-mouthed appeals for unity and calm but it is hard to see how politics can ever be the same again in what is likely to become the former United Kingdom. “Put the Great back into Great Britain” is not only an anachronism but somehow also perverse. There was once a Great Britain but it had become “Great” mainly because of its history of slavery, conquest and colonisation. One of the legacies of that colonisation has been the immigration from large parts of Africa and Asia yet, just as with the American West Indians (and indeed their Aboriginal Indians too), these groups remain the butt of much overt and occult racism.
The “West” has to live with that legacy just as it has to live with the legacy of the politics of greed and deregulation ushered in by Thatcher and Reagan. It was the almost complete deregulation of the markets, massive public and private debt and all sorts of insider dealing and misdealing that essentially spawned the economic crash of 2008. The austerity that resulted and the unequal way in which it has affected the rich and the poor is the real catalyst of the belief in Little-England that getting rid of Johnny Foreigner will solve these problems.
When times are bad there is a tendency to look for a scapegoat just as the Jews were latched onto by the Nazis in the depression of the 1930s. Such thinking is fundamentally wrong because it does not grasp that the heart of the problem nowadays is that the traditional working class population in a post-industrial UK is practically non-existent. It has been replaced by an underclass. A large underclass who have been ignored by all the traditional political parties. The disparity between the historically industrial parts of Britain versus the South-East has been blatantly obvious for a long time but no caring political group has addressed this problem in an open or pragmatic way. Only UKIP has tapped into this vacuum for their own xenophobic ambitions.
This underclass is also a group who, since “winning the war”, have had a particularly insular outlook towards the continent of Europe and who still believe that they are somehow “owed a living” – if not by having a cushy number then directly from the nanny state. It would probably be anathema to them to hear the words in J.F. Kennedy’s inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country“. It is mostly immigrants who do jobs which many Little-Englanders consider beneath their dignity. “They are taking away our jobs” they say but how many of them would actually go into the fields and pick vegetables or work in hospital laundries. Not too many, I guess.
The thing that could have helped keep the Great in Great Britain was to have embraced Europe more and not less. The European Union is unwieldy and also undemocratic when vetoes can be invoked. The British needed to be wholeheartedly involved to help to affect change within that institution, because this large economic bloc with the best of social aspirations needs to succeed if the totalitarian states, terrorists and a reactionary and insular USA are to have any effective counterbalance in an increasingly unstable world.
The big issues are not Johnny Foreigner in Little England but the increasing power of the multinationals, the concentration of capital in the hands of a few, the monopolisation of the media by oligarchies, the exponential growth of world population, the increasing incidence of severe weather and of global warming, the horrors brought about by islamofascism, the xenophobia of the far right, the neo-tzarism in Russia and even the prospect of an American President running the country like he ran “The Apprentice” on TV.
These big issues were hardly touched-on in the run up to the referendum. All one heard about were conflicting views about the economic effects and about the fear of immigration; of immigration that may well turn out to be less likely to be controlled in isolation. Nor did I hear any sincere discussion about the possible impacts on Scotland, Wales and Ireland (North and South) as well as on Gibraltar and any British Expats living within the European Union.
The Little Englanders (and some of the WASPs in Northern Ireland) can slap themselves on their backs and rejoice but if this result stands then these islands and indeed the world at large is a much more unstable and dangerous place. UKIP can moan that the politically induced assassination of Jo Cox was not of their making but for me she was a rare politician and human being who understood the difference between a Syrian refugee and an economic migrant; who loved her Yorkshire homeland and who might still be alive if Johnny Foreigner was not perceived as so rotten by Nigel Farage and his ilk. Never forget that it is individuals who really matter and not our institutions and that as Bertrand Russell once stated: “Love is wise; hatred is foolish“.
That this result can be called democratic is perverse. One can blame individuals for not having voted at all but it still seems crazy that about 35% of those with a vote could determine the fate of everyone and particularly against the will of Gibraltarians, Scots and the Irish as well as for those over the age of consent, who had no franchise at all. The electorate were lied-to and we now see the true colours of the main Brexiteers. Unfortunately National Polls were believed once again and the result undermines not only the Peace Process in place in Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Belfast Agreement but also all other decisions made by expats and others on the basis of an intact EU. Fintan O’Toole’s fine article “English nationalists put a bomb under the peace process” puts the case better than I can. That the “losers” of this referendum feel betrayed is completely understandable because the UK has reneged on so many of its obligations. This is not the result of a caring liberal democracy and for those, in areas where there was a majority desiring that the status quo be retained, they might now understand the iniquity of gerrymandering – even though no boundary changes have (at least yet) been involved.
The sovereign British Parliament needs to consider that the Referendum was fatally flawed, actually undemocratic and not obligatory and consider all other options before it triggers Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The fearful and downtrodden underclass needs proper attention and the EU still needs reform. Baling-out now it is the worst possible option and can only be seen as morally bereft.