Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain

by Fintan O'Toole

if the British army on the Western Front were lions led by donkeys, Brexit is those who feel they have nothing to lose led by those who will lose nothing either way.

This is a good book.

For the working-class voters who were crucial to the Brexit vote, this means that the reality is not so much that they are taking a gamble but rather that they are being gambled with. They are the ‘other people’ in their leaders’ gambles with other people’s money.

brexit as class-war

People – and states – don’t act merely out of self-interest. There are times when they make claims they know to be daft, but they can’t find a way to back down.

States will die before admitting their 'Destroy the World' plan was a mistake.

There was a headlong plunge in English support for the basic proposition that ‘England should be governed as it is now with laws made by the UK parliament’. In 1999, when the Scottish Parliament was just established, 62 per cent of English respondents agreed with this status quo. By 2008, this had fallen to a bare majority, 51 per cent. But by 2011, support for the status quo had collapsed even more dramatically to a mere 24 per cent and by 2012 it was down to 21 per cent. On the most fundamental question of democratic governance – who should make our laws? – over three-quarters of the English were out of sympathy with the existing arrangements. Instead, 36 per cent wanted England to be governed exclusively by English MPs at Westminster; 20 per cent wanted to be governed by a new English Parliament and 8 per cent wanted to see the establishment of devolved regional English Parliaments.10

This is an astonishing statistic. It was unreflected in open public discourse.