Life in the UK After the EU Referendum: Waking Up Repeatedly at a Funeral That Never Ends

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Life in the UK After the EU Referendum: Waking Up Repeatedly at a Funeral That Never Ends

Three days into this disaster, and the fallout is so immense that it colours everything. Bereaved-looking people are everywhere, talking about their disbelief, unable to process it. I had a migraine on Friday, and I don’t normally even get headaches. Many people are reporting similar symptoms — of colossal stress, of an unprocessable shock. Every time we distract ourselves for a moment from the awful reality — that we’ve left the EU and that everything is now in freefall; not just our economy, but basically every certainty we had before Friday morning — we wake up again to the horror of it all, like having endless deja vu at a funeral without end, like being in a real-life version of film in which aliens have taken over, even though they look just like us.

My funereal encounters are taking place in London, where a majority of those who could be bothered to vote — 60% — called for us to remain in the EU. I live in Lewisham, where the portion of Remain votes was even higher — 70% — so I can presume that I am not surrounded by the deluded, or by those with hideously misplaced anger, however justifiable that anger may be, although I accept that even that is difficult. I have been ambushed in recent weeks by the odd middle class, educated person my age (circa 50) supporting the Leave campaign, and I can’t help but be instinctively suspicious of older white people.

However, I also know it’s not just a white issue. About two years I was in a queue in a service station in Brixton, and I struck up a conversation with a black man about my age, who seemed to me to be a Windrush descendant. I started some small talk, leaning it leftwards as soon as I could, as is my wont, and thinking he would agree with me, until he started talking about how it was all the fault of the immigrants. Since that encounter and others, I have grown to be wary of casually chatting with my fellow citizens on the street.

But if London is largely the same country it was before the referendum, albeit in profound shock, the same cannot be said of these large swathes of the country where the Leave voters outnumbered those calling for us to Remain, and where a legion of stories are already emerging of racism taken to the next step — of people being openly abused in the street, and told to go home. Social media, meanwhile, is a cesspit of racist, xenophobic and Islamophobic filth. The genie that is out of the bottle is a nasty, brutish creature, a 21st century revival of those who, 85 years ago in Germany, began to see Adolf Hitler as their saviour.

And Nigel Farage, who secured 3.9 million votes in the 2015 General Election, after the mainstream media slavishly covered his every utterance as though he was the Prime Minister, has bounced back from his subsequent disappearance — again, with the mainstream media disgracefully attending him every step of the way. How many more of the 17.4 million million people who voted to leave might now vote for UKIP if another opportunity arose — enabling, like Hitler, the rise of fascists in Parliament.

So as we survey the wreckage of Britain today, what can be done by those of us who comprehend that the ties that bind us — that bound us — to the EU, and that confirmed a web of interconnected relationships within Europe, and outside its borders, built up over four decades, are — or were — immense, and yet almost none of that was discussed during the puerile bunfight of the referendum campaign? I’m an educated and reasonably well-informed person, but even I couldn’t begin to tell you how much legislation and funding has been put in place over that time that affects every aspect of British life and the British economy, but over the last few weeks I managed to think about a few of them, and I have ended up believing that the important information discussed in the referendum was rather like the Bush administration’s planning for the Iraq invasion. When the State Department gave Donald Rumsfeld a massive report on what would be involved in nation-building, he chucked it in the bin and replaced it with a single sheet of paper that read, “They will greet us with flowers.” Just last week, a friend alerted me to the possibly fatal impact of leaving the EU on Britain’s university sector, which has been massively encouraged to seek out EU students as the Tories cut their funding, foreign students whose costs are — were — subsidised by the EU, but I heard nothing about that during the campaign.

Those of us who care about human rights have long been dismayed by the Tories’ intention of dismantling our human rights legislation — something that almost all Tories agree on. This is based on a mendacious but well-publicised campaign to suggest that the EU prevents us from sending home alleged terror suspects we don’t like, for generally unspecified reasons, when that is patently untrue. The legislation, in the European Convention on Human Rights, drafted after the Second World War (and which, incidentally, included a prominent role by the British Conservative MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, who had been a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials), cannot be undone unless we withdraw from the Council of Europe — which, of course, we may well do now, as EU membership is only possible when countries are CoE members, and now we’re not, we’ll be free to join that bastion of extremism, Belarus, as the only other country in Europe that has done away with human rights legislation.

In addition, of course, the EU has also contributed significantly to other rights appreciated by people across the UK. Check out this article — noting how the EU has been responsible for curbing excessive working hours, protecting pregnant women at work, harmonising equality laws, protecting people’s personal data, combatting disability discrimination, acting against gender and age discrimination and fighting for the rights of minorities, and also check out the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights.

A friend of mine recently lamented that no one in the arts sector had paid attention to the huge significance of EU funding, and, of course, the Leave campaign constantly lied that EU money to the poorer parts of the country would be replaced — a joke when delivered by politicians who are absolutely devoted to the destruction of all subsidies for anyone except the rich, but one that seems to have worked. For further information, I recommend the sad and almost surreal story of Ebbw Vale in South Wales, which has received massive financial support from the EU, but which voted to leave, pretty much cutting its own throat in doing so.

Almost nothing of significance was mentioned in the campaign. David Cameron, the coward and narcissist, now consigned to a dustbin of political failure that is so abject that it contains few predecessors (think Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden, and then reflect that they may be small fry compared to the scale of Cameron’s disaster), called a referendum he didn’t want simply to placate the far right of his own party and UKIP, and then arrogantly thought Remain would win, and ran a tragically poor campaign that has resulted in his political annihilation.

In contrast, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, two other dangerous narcissists, went even further. Although Cameron (and Osborne, and others in the Tory Remain campaign) looked pretty stupid every time they tried to defend Europe, having bashed the EU repeatedly for years, Johnson and Gove saw an opportunity to further their careers by leading the Leave campaign without even believing in it, enabling them to position themselves as successors to Cameron who, unlike the PM, had listened to the people’s concerns.

As Nick Cohen explained in his article, There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, “The media do not damn themselves, so I am speaking out of turn when I say that if you think rule by professional politicians is bad wait until journalist politicians take over. Johnson and Gove are the worst journalist politicians you can imagine: pundits who have prospered by treating public life as a game.”

He added:

The Leave campaign has no plan. And that is not just because there was a shamefully under-explored division between the bulk of Brexit voters who wanted the strong welfare state and solid communities of their youth and the leaders of the campaign who wanted Britain to become an offshore tax haven. Vote Leave did not know how to resolve difficulties with Scotland, Ireland, the refugee camp at Calais, and a thousand other problems, and did not want to know either.

As he also noted:

[N]ot since Suez has the nation’s fate been decided by politicians who knowingly made a straight, shameless, incontrovertible lie the first plank of their campaign. Vote Leave assured the electorate it would reclaim a supposed £350m Brussels takes from us each week. They knew it was a lie. Between them, they promised to spend £111bn on the NHS, cuts to VAT and council tax, higher pensions, a better transport system and replacements for the EU subsidies to the arts, science, farmers and deprived regions … [E]xperts said that, far from being rich, we would face a £40bn hole in our public finances.

And now, having unexpectedly won, neither Johnson nor Gove seems to want to have anything to do with the poisoned chalice that they have secured. Cameron, a coward and narcissist to the end, immediately resigned, refusing to trigger Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, which states that “[a]ny member state may decide to withdraw from the union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements,” leaving that task to his successors, whoever they may be.

And as a reader called Teebs explained in a much-cited comment on the Guardian’s website yesterday:

If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost. Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron.

With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership. How?

Throughout the campaign, Cameron had repeatedly said that a vote for leave would lead to triggering Article 50 straight away. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the image was clear: he would be giving that notice under Article 50 the morning after a vote to leave. Whether that was scaremongering or not is a bit moot now but, in the midst of the sentimental nautical references of his speech yesterday, he quietly abandoned that position and handed the responsibility over to his successor.

And as the day wore on, the enormity of that step started to sink in: the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legislation to be torn up and rewritten … the list grew and grew.

The referendum result is not binding. It is advisory. Parliament is not bound to commit itself in that same direction. The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50? Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?

Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-maneouvered and check-mated. If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over — Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession … broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.

The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice. When Boris Johnson said there was no need to trigger Article 50 straight away, what he really meant to say was “never”. When Michael Gove went on and on about “informal negotiations” … why? why not the formal ones straight away? … he also meant not triggering the formal departure. They both know what a formal demarche would mean: an irreversible step that neither of them is prepared to take.

All that remains is for someone to have the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction, that cannot be borne. And David Cameron has put the onus of making that statement on the heads of the people who led the Brexit campaign.

Not all of the above is true — I’m not convinced, crucially, that finding someone who has “the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction” is sufficient to overturn the result — but it is important, I think, to recognise that implementing Article 50 is definitely a poisoned chalice, and that all the woes and insanely complicated bureaucracy that will follow — as Teebs put it so well, dealing with “the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legislation to be torn up and rewritten” — will become the responsibility of Cameron’s successor, of someone who was a strong advocate for the Leave campaign.

Personally, I’d like to have seen Cameron refuse to accept the referendum result, and then fall on his sword, with MPs also refusing to accept the result that a clear majority of them don’t support (and perhaps MPs collectively are who Teebs was thinking of), followed by a General Election, but that may just be my desperation speaking — the desperation of wanting to wake from this endless nightmare that shouldn’t have happened, and that wouldn’t have happened without the incompetence, arrogance and mendacity of Cameron, Johnson, Gove and every single senior Tory who backed one or other of these senseless positions.

But instead of the media reporting on the above — or on the waking nightmare currently experienced by a majority of the 16.1 million people who voted Remain, or on the increase in racism since the result of the referendum was announced on Friday — what do get instead, as the very fabric of reality is torn asunder and nothing that is left is solid or reliable?

Well, instead of the above we are told that the only story that counts is of Blairite Labour MPs’ revolt against Jeremy Corbyn — MPs who, in case you’d forgotten, were so unimpressive to Labour voters last summer that they contributed to Jeremy’s landslide victory, although the main factor in Jeremy’s victory was that his lifelong socialism struck a resounding chord with voters whose party used to be a socialist party, and who were fed up with losing another General Election after a lacklustre campaign in which the Labour Party leadership failed to show conviction about almost anything, so desperate were they not to upset Tory voters who didn’t vote for them anyway.

To watch the news this morning as I did — from the BBC, the Biased Broadcasting Corporation — was to be told that Jeremy Corbyn was to blame for the referendum that was pointlessly called and lost by Cameron, and won by the most colossal hypocrites in history, led by the almost unbelievably self-serving Boris Johnson, and the creeping and creepy proto-fascist Nigel Farage.

Are we really supposed to believe that a Blairite Labour Party, almost indistinguishable from the Tories, would have changed the minds of millions of alienated voters, obsessed with obstinately deluded and simplistic notions about immigration and the role of the EU, and, with unerring accuracy, in contrast, convinced that Westminster is full of remote MPs who serve only themselves?

The alienated can only be won back by reversing the widespread depoliticisation that began under Thatcher and that has almost wiped out class consciousness and solidarity, and that, I contend, can only be achieved by some form of socialism — something that Jeremy Corbyn, and his Chancellor, the wonderful John McDonnell, and his team of left-wing economic experts, have been busy demonstrating as viable, even though the mainstream media has almost entirely ignored them.

Jeremy Corbyn is a rarity amongst politicians — a genuinely nice person who cares deeply about everyone suffering injustice. I concede that he lacks a certain energy and a demonstration of passion, but if an argument can be made that he should be replaced (and I’m really not convinced that it can be), then the only person who should replace him, if Labour is to stand a chance of challenging British voters’ alienation and/or right-wing drift, is someone who shares all his values, but is younger and more energetic. This revolt, in contrast, only plays only into the hands of the Tory establishment, just when the spotlight of disgust should be shining relentlessly on them, is, yet again, another disgraceful betrayal by the mainstream media — of those who regard themselves as “objective” — of their proper role, which is to challenge dangerous hypocrisy and extremism in politics, and not to act as stenographers for right-wing Labour Party failures, breathtakingly self-serving Tory hypocrites like Boris Johnson, and proto-fascists like Nigel Farage.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).