The Referendum fallout

With everyone becoming a psephological expert over the last few weeks, I thought it best to wait a couple of weeks to digest the result of the EU referendum.

When I went to bed at around 10 on the night of the 23rd, Nigel Farage was being quoted as saying "Remain have edged it". When I got up at nearly 4am to watch the results come in, he was giving a premature victory speech, pontificating about "decent, real people" having won the day "without a shot being fired". (This despite the fact that an MP had been shot and killed less than a week earlier as campaigning reached its frayed apex.)

Having not been enamoured by either of the options on the table - a largely unreformed EU or a Tory party given free reign to complete their Thatcherite mission - but having voted Remain on the day, I have subsequently arrived at a handful of general thoughts:

1.
The dominance of immigration in deciding the vote reveals a depressing but unsurprising reality. As I wrote on this blog a few days before the vote, the ghosts of prejudices-past that were supposed to have been exorcised by globalisation have been awoken; an indictment of both the left and right to adequately address them.

However, while many voted Leave in the hope that immigration would be curtailed or reversed, with trade deals almost certain to include free movement of people (it being a fundamental tenet of the capitalist consensus) they will likely be sorely disappointed when those high street mosques and Polish delis go exactly no where.

2.
While not everyone who voted Leave will have been xenophobic or racist, they did nonetheless take the decision to ignore almost the entire weight of the establishment as well as experts from economics, science, law amongst other fields, in favour of those who clearly are.

Throughout the campaign, people were crying that no one was "giving us any facts"... when we live in a hyper-real world suffused with accessible information this is an absurdity. Indeed never in the history of civilisation has the banquet of facts and opinions been so glutinous. The reality being that so many chose to disregard facts and reason should give considerable cause for concern.

3.
The result may prove to be the touch-paper on which generational discontent begins to burn.

After all, the older generations who benefitted the most from the successes of globalisation - affordable property, free education, 'jobs for life', golden pensions, large-scale peace - have now decided in large part to rebel against its failures, at the same time risking the future of many millions of young people.

With a greying society that affords baby boomers such power and influence, it would not be a surprise if the younger generation, and especially millenials, started to exhibit increasing signs of resentment towards them.

4.
The Leave result was a real hammer blow to the neoliberal consensus. Whether they may have realised it or not, so many voted as a rebellion against the influence and might of a global capitalist system that impoverishes and disenfranchises whole sections of society. It is a crumbling edifice of socio-economic orthodoxy that, as the political centre-ground subsides across Europe and America, means late-capitalism is well and truly upon us, and real change of one sort or another is just around the corner.

5.
Indeed, there is the real potential for Britain, free from the overbearing rules of the EU, to divert from the fixed-gear trajectory towards market capitalism and privatisation that serves to widen societal inequalities ever further and foster disharmony.

However, I remain convinced that on issues such as the environment, climate change, cyber security, tax avoidance, and disruptive technologies, national borders are arcane and irrelevant concepts for which broader collaboration and mutual cooperation is the only way to ensure decisive and substantial steps are taken.

6.
The petulant and reactionary response of those on the Remain side and the Labour party (with what must surely be one of the worst coup attempts of all time) has shone a harsh light on the parlous regard many hold the democratic process. Where were the masses with their 'I heart EU' placards before the 23rd?!

And if we really want to 'take back control' from the undemocratic elites, how about dismantling the House of Lords, pushing for electoral reform away from a voting system that places the balance of power in a handful of marginal market towns, oh and abolishing the monarchy while we're at it....