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.
Ditching the EU when things are going relatively smoothly and joining back in when the whole place is on fire?
Classic British Excellence
The fact the UK no longer has access to Russian gas, and is giving Ukraine all its money is also a major factor here. Things didn’t get really bad until the Ukraine war
Eh, a lot of the bad shit is happening because Britain has been absoutely wedded to the policy of austerity and “balanced budgets” for the better part of 20 years. So when you remove all the institutional capacity and safety nets, almost any singular “black swan” event will lead to a cascade of other insane events.
The EU is absolutely in favour of austerity and they had plenty of nice things to say about the Tories’ “tough love” approach to governing, but they also view austerity as something akind to disciplining a child, which is why they were so heavily in favour of it for Greece after their debt crisis. Even when Varoufakis showed them that their calculations were wrong and would only lead to stronger down turn.
leaving the giant supranational anti-democratic neoliberal bloc was unequivocally a good thing
doing it under a tory government was the dumbest fucking idea in the universe
also i cannot emphasize enough to americans how extremely middle class the remain campaign was
like “we should stay in the eu because our holidays in the south of france will be cheaper” levels of out of touch wankery
UK was only ever going to leave the EU to become more Conservative and nationalist. UK politics is just extremely depressing.
i think there would have been a decent chance of a good brexit for the working class under corbyn
despite him being what i consider a minimum viable politician, he is at least anti-imperialist and doesn’t want to feed poors like me into a woodchipper
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.
I’m no fan our Brexit, but whenever I see these headlines all I see is a parasite media class trying to offload the responsibility of 12+ years of brutal austerity that they supported, and are now calling for again with even deeper cuts with even more destructive results, onto ordinary people they imagine are undesirables.
The EU should stick a piece of paper on their side of the English channel with “No limeys allowed!” written in crayon.
