Bitterness will remain after the leaving
IT WAS light in central London at 4am on June 24. Later, someone would describe this break in what has been yet another sham of an English summer as an indication of changing fortunes. The streets were unusually quiet as the announcement of the referendum’s result approached: at 9am, Jenny Watson, the chief counting officer of the UK Electoral Commission, appeared on BBC 1.
I looked at some accompanying social commentary shortly after she declared the Leave campaign had won.
You would have thought this woman had just cut the ribbon on a 21st-century Malleus Maleficarum. Heads need to be chopped off. Cats should be drowned. Bridges must be set on fire. Events that have formed in the wake of Brexit will stay with me for the rest of my life. It has been an exhilarating experience, an examination of unhinged fury and selfrighteousness.
As a child, I watched my father craft election campaign material for political parties. Identity and wedge politics were largely absent then; because of the emphasis upon unfashionable civil duty, campaigns were executed on the theory of re-enforcement, not revelation.
Technical evidence existed behind most claims.
Referendums are different, filled with ambiguity and mathematical deception — the kind of stuff that tears friendships apart, where family members storm off from dinner tables. So filthy.
There were always legitimate reasons to resist EU bureaucracy and interference, to demand reforms of this unelected body.
Given the choice, no economy in the world would wish association with the likes of Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, or Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament.
Juncker reportedly drinks cognac for breakfast and is “dribbling by lunch”; Schulz reveres the late British Marxist Eric Hobsbawm.
The EU’s practices, principally its obses- sion with regulation, have not only proven to be antibusiness, but antidemocratic too.
Policy is not discussed in its parliament; decisions are made behind closed doors.
Its officials set their own extremely modest tax brackets and are beneficiaries of obscene largesse in the form of multiple allowances.
This is not service, this is not even politics — it’s a perpetual junket and its participants have no idea what it’s like to have no money.
There is a tragedy to the Leave campaign’s victory. Its power did not exist in the cities, where the young and educated and employed voted to remain.
It came from the wastelands of the north, from the man with the crooked teeth peering suspiciously from behind his window into the street, from the woman wretchedly dragging her shopping trolley to Poundland.
And it came from the pensioner smoking in the corridor of his council estate, lamenting his own father’s words about Britain controlling one quarter of the world’s landmass at the height of its empire.
The Leave campaign exploited this contempt. Challenging the entrenched power of the EU by re-enforcing the conduct of Brussels alone would arguably have resulted in a victory for the opposition’s campaign.
An instrument had to accompany the plausible, economic argument for depar- ture — something blunted by irrational fear and delusional nationalism.
Here lies the tragedy: outside of having one or two fewer things to complain about, the lives of the people who voted on a singular basis against the prospect of refugees and open borders to Eastern Europe will not change.
Processions of them were wheeled out from chip shops and working men’s clubs in flammable tracksuits; like dogs in a cage they were poked with contentious propaganda on buses and posters before being unleashed to the polls.
Now they are consigned again to irrelevance, this time possibly for good.
Because outside of the hysteria of uncertainty, the apparatus that determines the world’s movements remains much greater and more consistent than a referendum. How you live, how you see the world, all your bitterness and resentment, doesn’t actually matter when it’s not useful.
Life goes on and moves at a pace too sophisticated, too advanced to accommodate momentary explosions of racism or xenophobia as permanent fixtures.
But if there was ever any doubt, events of the last week have absolutely confirmed that today’s career politicians really are ruthless little bastards.