Now. Brits might have made a terrible mistake, but they aren’t fools. They are beginning to realize, to their horror, that Brexit has been a calamity of historic proportions. That’s not because anyone’s telling them the straight facts above, because they’ve got some kind of theoretical knowledge about it, but more simply, because they’re living it. Hence, in the latest polls, 2/3s of Brits want another referendum, on rejoining the EU again.
That’s because they are beginning to see what “Brexit is already 2/3 of the way to the Great Depression” or “Brexit turned Britain into Argentina” really means.
Consequences aren’t real until it starts hitting me in the face.
This is what’s so frustrating, the EU completely blows but it was obvious from the start that the overwhelming majority of Brexit supporting politicians weren’t planning for it to happen and had no intention of doing it in a way that would benefit the country/people.
And yeah as you say, much like Trump Vs Clinton, while there was an undeniable chud streak in the leave side (although I would argue that for some leave voters it was a protest vote against the neoliberal malaise of the Cameron government, albeit with little class consciousness), the remain side - representing the same old shitty, liberal order that had made itself unpopular through decades of austerity - ran a terrible, hubris ridden, smug campaign forwarded by self satisfied uberliberal fuckwits like James O’Brien which certainly can’t have helped.
Also People’s Vote was 100% a Blairite (and let’s be honest, almost certainly GCHQ backed) op to fuck over Corbyn in the North.
I always thought the leave side was about making it easier to keep out brown people.
Oh yeah, don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of that sort of shit too, and I don’t mean to sugarcoat the undeniable chud element, but I did meet a fair few people back when I was doing organising for Corbyn who did hold actual criticisms of the EU with no materialist analysis. This was almost certainly the exception, not the rule though. Of course, equally it didn’t help that there was plenty of lib racism on the Remain side who often argued “But it’s so e m p o w e r i n g that African migrants can get up at 3AM to make below the living wage working in coffee kiosks and holding signs advertising golf sales!”
It goes without saying but the media deliberately muddied the waters too, Corbyn once pointed out that CEOs bring in cheap migrant labour because they can pay them less and that we need to address that in a way that supports all workers and was directly compared to Nigel Farage by places like the Guardian.
