Catastrophe

So post-truth politics won the day and in a grotesque act of national self-harm Britain has voted to leave the EU. Within hours reality began to bite back as the warnings of the much-derided experts started to become true. Stock markets around the world were in free fall, the pound crashed through the floor, and companies began to announce plans to move jobs and investment out. All through the campaign leavers braggingly talked of how Britain is the world’s fifth largest economy. Not any more it isn’t. Within just a day it has become the sixth largest. Again as warned, Scotland made the first moves towards what will undoubtedly be independence, and Northern Ireland might well follow or in any case faces turmoil. Calls to shift the British border back from Calais began. The Prime Minister resigned but not with immediate effect and so a complete political paralysis now exists, and there are rumours that senior civil servants are likely to resign en masse because they know that what they are going to be expected to deliver is completely impractical. This is just day one of what will be years of uncertainty and chaos.

Reality bit in other ways, too. Before the sun had set leading Brexiters disowned the claims that there would be £350M a week more spent on the NHS, and that there would be reductions in immigration. So that was two of the three central planks of their campaign discarded. And what of the third, ‘taking back control’? As had again been said all along, it immediately emerged that the Brexiters have not a single idea about what it is that is now going to happen, when, or how. Having with anarchistic, reckless glee booted down the central pillars of decades of foreign and economic policy they had literally nothing – nothing - to say other than that a ‘glorious future’ beckoned. Suddenly, having won their prize they do not even want to begin the process of leaving and seem amazed and outraged that the rest of the EU is saying that they need to do so. Out is out.

There are no good outcomes for England now. The best that can be hoped for might be some kind of Norwegian-style arrangement, although it is by no means clear that this will be available. Even if it were it would be very tricky, politically, although there would be a parliamentary majority for it, because it would mean free movement of people. But as the effects of Brexit get clearer, and the lies of the leave campaign are exposed, there are already signs that some who voted to leave are regretting it (‘Regrexit’ is the word du jour) and if opinion polls bore that out in large numbers it’s just about conceivable that such an arrangement could be agreed without a further referendum. It would just about honour the letter of the vote to leave the EU and frankly since the leavers refused to spell out what leave meant they would just have to accept that. But it would lead to decades of claims of ‘betrayal’ and ‘we did not know what we voted for’.

Whatever happens, the economic consequences are going to be dire for years to come. Anyone thinking that it represents a triumph of working-class solidarity over global neo-liberalism is in for a very nasty shock indeed when jobs start to haemorrhage and public finances and services collapse. A very chilling lesson in reality is about to administered and although it won’t only be those who voted leave who suffer it is likely to impact them the worst.  But the real catastrophe is a cultural one. It is a massive defeat for Britain as a place of tolerance, cosmopolitanism and openness; a victory for every sort of prejudice, for sullen and bitter anti-intellectualism, for resentful small-mindedness. Huge rifts between classes, generations and regions have been opened and they aren’t going to be healed any time soon. My European friends living here are shocked and scared, whilst friends abroad look on in bemusement and horror at what has happened.

As for me, I feel distraught and physically sick. As the Brexiters crow of having ‘got their country back’, I feel that I have lost my home and now live in exile.