Brexit through the gift shop
I am holed up in a Parisian garret with a nasty cold. This is supposed to be a week of random tourism with my daughter and mother. They are off having fun (of a sort) and I am stuck in bed with my phone and computer.
With little else to do I have become somewhat fixated by the political meltdown in the UK following Brexit.
On June 24, the day after the referendum, I got this message from a business colleague in the London financial sector – “p.s. I hope you’re enjoying the Brexit debacle from the other side of the channel – it’s absolute carnage and disbelief over here.”
And there you go. That’s all it took for my interest to be properly piqued.
That and the fact that my German colleagues in Munich last week either (a) refused to discuss the then upcoming referendum, or (b) refused to engage in anything other than a religious-like debate on the subject, i.e. no rational counter argument to the ‘remain’ position was to be entered into.
Before I travelled to Europe I was aware of Brexit. I read the Guardian Online, hence I am exposed to a few more matters d’Angleterre than your average Sydney Morning Herald reader (that get served up an endless diet of Australian political gossip, various goings-on in the four football codes, and “6 ways to lose weight for summer”).
I had noticed, leading up to the referendum, that the arguments for ‘remain’ were getting progressively sillier and sillier, capped by my favourite – “Brexit problems for disabled passengers” wherein the author firstly noted that access for disabled people to UK airports had been made better by EU laws and therefore leaving the EU would makes things somehow worse.
In fact, the Guardian hardly ran any stories supporting ‘leave’, displaying an enormous bias by their editorial team.
The polls were predicting a win for ‘remain’ by a few points, as were the bookies, the whole of the London financial sector, and other self-interested parties lulled by the fact that voter conservatism usually wins out in complex national or international policy matters that are mystifyingly put to referenda.
Because I have been crook for a couple of days I have had ample time to bone up on the Brexit subject and now consider myself an expert.
I see two aspects to the matter; the kinetics and the thermodynamics (hijacking some very useful concepts from chemistry, of all things).
The kinetics, the “how did we get here”, are easy to explain. Politicians in the UK are pretty much like politicians in Australia; Pavlovian dogs with nothing better to eat than their own regurgitated egos.
So when you have dozens of them, each using the Brexit issue to advance its own cause, you have a dog’s breakfast of a process that could and did go where no one expected it to. I won’t name names; that has been done by others and the main culprits are well known to all.
And I say ‘culprits’ because the debate on the matter wasn’t very informative and often was deliberately misleading and self-serving. Not in anyone’s interest, that.
More interesting to me is the thermodynamics of the situation. That is, why is over half of the population of the UK so pissed off that they would vote themselves out of the EU? Or off the island, out of the house, or anything…
And then the Guardian came to the rescue. They reported some plots of various voter characteristics versus how these people voted in the referendum.
And the biggie was income – the lower the income bracket the greater the percentage of people that voted ‘leave’. It was a pretty linear correlation.
There were some other trends to note as well. Education levels mirrored income levels. Age had little correlation despite all the stories claiming otherwise.
There was also a plot showing “% residents not born in the UK”. This only highlighted that those not born in the UK had an ‘outlier’ group that were rationally in favour of ‘remain’, but did little to support the leave/racism hypothesis.
Now being trained as a physical chemist I am always very careful when interpreting data. We were taught that a correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, unless you are a journalist, an economist or a politician.
So I first want to emphasise that what follows is, at best, a hypothesis.
Together, automation in manufacturing and Asian manufacturing have cruelled much of the working labour market in the UK. The government (in various forms) hasn’t appropriately stepped in to create sufficient artificial jobs in the services sector through ‘nanny state’ regulations. We are much better at this in Australia by the way.
So the folks in London are doing just fine, having a glorious time trading away in the services sector, but keeping most of the proceeds for themselves.
How do they do this? Well, the wealth creation has increasingly been concentrated in certain segments of society and the mechanism of taxation that act to collect and then distribute this wealth haven’t been adapted to account for the changes in where the wealth is generated.
Call it neoliberalism if you will. I just call it greed mixed with power, and a heavy dose of stupidity. You can avoid democracy in a democracy for a while, but eventually it will come and bite you in the arse.
As it did on June 23, 2016.
My hypothesis is that Brexit was passed because the ‘remain’ crowd were so obviously on one side of the debate. The disenfranchised seem to inexplicably care more for their national football team than the EU. Even so, this was an easy target to hit, once recognised.
The ‘remain’ proponents would have been far better advised to stay very quiet and not make an issue of the whole thing. The more shrill they became, the more obvious their self-interest.
Thus, so armed, the disenfranchised have well and truly sent the message to London.
However, in terms of an approach to solving the problem, it’s akin to completely missing the nail with the hammer, losing one’s grip and beaning the foreman with the thing.
Oops, sorry mate!
What next?
My suggestion is that the situation needs a little leadership.
The UK has a chance of staying as the UK and of staying in the EU, but only if someone steps up and first addresses the wrongs of three decades of rampant neoliberalism that have left over half the population well and truly behind.
Any while they are at it, they may as well have a shot at fixing up the EU as well. I mean what sort of organisation creates a multi-national common currency and monetary policy without a corresponding common fiscal policy? If I were a member alongside this bunch of dopes, I’d apply the Groucho rule and look for the EUxit.
offshore westerly 