An Essay On Presuming, or Looking Down On Brexit from Lofty Heights.
To quote the three pillars upon which I have built my existence...
“Many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.” - Aristotle (Politics)
“How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye? You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” - Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 7:5)
“There are no more races to be run
There are no numbers left to be won
Everybody's down we pulled each other down
There never was a truth to be found... We're in our minds five billion pieces so defined Read it in a book, it was underlined” - Fugazi (Styrofoam)
To tackle all the events of the week in which Britain voted to leave the European Union will involve unimaginable reams of research and opinion and at this point only a few days after the polls were returned, no-one is able to predict how things will pan out. But what’s going on suggests a few themes, all of which are important to acknowledge, especially if we hope to move onto a place of redemption and hope, rather than the embedded division that currently exists.
First, in the past, Britain, or perhaps only England, has maintained a status of what you could call “above-ness”. If you read something from England on America’s gun culture, or Australia or France’s problems with immigration or cultural integration, or Japan’s suicide rates, there’s a thread of almost patronising sympathy regarding the issues. A notion of acknowledgement of “what it must be like to be a different country who have real problems.”
And what this highlights is that a) we believe ourselves to be without significant problems, and b) we see ourselves as a literal and metaphorical island. The issues in other places aren’t coming here, so they won’t be our concern.
With withdrawal from the EU, the protection from the horrors of the world suddenly has shown itself to some to be temporary, or perhaps no longer permanent. And those who didn’t believe the exit would happen are suddenly faced with a realisation that the things that are hard for most of the rest of humanity might soon be hard for us too. Our elite lifestyle has bubbled around us for years, and when there is some glee amongst WWII survivors that “people will now know what it was like for us”, it highlights just how spoiled we have appeared, even to people in our own nation. While the poorest in the UK have suffered and gone without (the rich are 64% richer than before the recession, while the poor are 57% poorer - Independent, 10/03/15), and while parts of the world are incapacitated by poverty (80-95% unemployed in Zimbabwe for example), the voices of Britain have stayed largely silent.
Someone i know who used to be in a moderately successful punk rock band wrote on the internet this week “at least punk bands will have something to write songs about other than parties and drinking now”, as if a democratically organised referendum that didn’t go the way everyone wanted was the greatest tragedy in the world in the 21st century. In truth, the tragedies have been happening within earshot forever, but we’ve been inclined not to hear them or understand them for years. Perhaps this exposure to things not going our way will shift our blasé-ness to understand the global and local community we’re in a bit better. And let there be no doubt - we are in the world. A redefining of unions doesn’t stop our fate being absolutely interconnected with the fate of all the world’s people. Humans have been travelling to here, from here, and through here for longer than the Vikings had longboats, and Irish saints built Currachs. And they’ll keep coming on jetski, rocket pack, rubber dinghy. Any kind of departure from any kind of union is political, not social. People will still seek out other people, and so much more technology has made all people inseparable. And so, we have to adjust accordingly, as we should have done years ago, to see ourselves as in the global community, not as saviours or conquerors, but as colleagues and friends.
Second, you know when you’re 9, and you will not hear a bad word said about Andrei Kanchelskis (he was my favourite winger), or your cousin loves Take That, but hates Boyzone (particularly Shane), or (and you knew it was getting ridiculous at this point) you got into a fight with your best friend because Vauxhall cars were definitely worse than Ford cars. The blindness of side taking is maddening when you’re in Primary School, but in adulthood, it should have dissipated. You sometimes see it in discussions about sport when someone proclaims their team to believe in and signify fair-play/winning/bringing on the youth (delete as appropriate) more than any other team, and everyone can see the argument to be a ludicrous carry-on. But (and perhaps its the internet that brings out the worst in people’s argumentative sides) this referendum has again highlighted both the blind following of one side over another, and the refusal to see anyone else’s point of view. And the “why can’t you see my point of view” question only sometimes seems to apply to others, and not the question asker.
If the left leaning can’t see that there are alternative political viewpoints that also have value, strength and are applicable, and instead name all within a conservative notion of business as terrible; or the right leaning can’t see that they might hope for state support if they came from a different background and are appalled by any such idea, then both need to broaden their horizons. Politics has become more biased than the Devon derby responses on exeweb.co.uk or pasoti.org (Plymouth Argyle Supporters On The Internet - yeah, i know, ridiculous...). “Cameron only cares about making money for his friends”, “Corbyn would sell the Crown Jewels to Chairman Mao given half the chance”, etc etc. The assessment by a person of a government policy on its own merit seems to be an impossible dream, and this tribalism reeks of cutting off our nose to spite our face. The Conservative Party could produce an incredibly fair and gifted and driven leader, and many on the other side would automatically hate them. The Labour Party could inspire Jeremy Corbyn to present his ideas differently, in ways that made sense to everyone, and his opposites would still hate him as a matter of course.
If you read the history of the Spanish Civil War, the divisions and coalitions are baffling. Fighting between factions was commonplace and side switching was endless. Any common values were neglected in the face of minor differences. General Franco won the war and ruled for years because the opposition couldn’t get themselves organised. While you might think you hate the arrogance of the Tories, or the liberalism of the left, there are a great many more things that are more dreadful than we can imagine, that will be much more hated, that aren’t yet in our view. And history tells us that those things appear when we’re too busy studying the minutiae to notice the clouds forming overhead.
Third, there is a trend of hypocrisy that has exposed itself - a critique of the “xenophobic Brexiter”, made by someone bemoaning the working classes for their prejudice and lack of education. Not for the first time, many outside of it expect the working class (whatever that means, and wherever it stretches to today) to be thugs, louts, teenage mums, massive tellies with full credit cards, and Happy Meals. And when the polls tell us that areas with “less education” and “more working class employment” voted to leave the EU, and the media finds folks on the streets to say its all about immigration, then aspersions have been cast. Assumptions made include the idea that anyone from the working class voting to leave is too stupid to be anything other than a racist, and that the working classes have suddenly been downgraded from “not university educated” to “a complete bogtrotter, living in a hedge”. Some of the biggest challenges we see towards racism are made by those who live in the places where many races dwell side by side, and this multiculturalism doesn’t happen at Eton or Cambridge, but it happens most in the poorest areas of our country, many of which are currently being branded as racist hotbeds.
Even if its true that some of the working class areas in the UK produced a majority of votes to leave the EU, very few areas actually had runaway results. Most regional numbers were close run things, but the narrative suits the purpose if we can say that the poor old disenfranchised workers primitive nature meant that all they could do was kick out at the ones that love them unconditionally. Instead, let’s propose a different narrative - a paradigm of potential. The Guardian ran a story this weekend about the Welsh town of Ebbw Vale which received significant EU funding, but still voted overwhelmingly to leave (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/25/view-wales-town-showered-eu-cash-votes-leave-ebbw-vale). The article highlights that while facilities have been given to the place, it hasn’t been enough to convince the town that they actually are living in clover. The mother’s words “this is why you can’t have nice things’ might spring to mind as you read that article, but there is a resonance of a bigger issue - the Welsh (or Cornish, or Highlands) town or village was one that allowed for social mobility through the individual’s and the working class’ own volition - the chapel, the union, the sports club, allowed many men and women to find their own value and scope for progress in the world. You might train as a preacher, become treasurer for the factory union, or be voted in as President of the football club. And these non-conformist traditions allowed for huge individual growth. The mechanisms were inclusively developed to allow steps up to be taken. But the industry has changed and now only offers entry level work in your town. The chapel is empty, and the sports club has closed. The ambition still remains, but the outlets are reduced. The issues that these narratives represent are for another day, but maybe the referendum (in a system where electoral protest votes invariably make no difference at all) was a chance to shout that not everything is ok, and parachutes simply aren’t as ‘good’ as self produced achievements. Maybe the road that the EU built is helpful, or the factory they encouraged pays the bills, or the housing they provided was necessary, but is it as good as what came before it was needed? No, it probably isn’t.
If any type of conclusion can be reached at such an early stage of aftermath, it occurs to me to be a question of measure - our 21st century approach, largely based upon social media seems to require snap judgements that explain everything within a sentence or two. In truth, humanity and society is much more complex than that. The reality is that none of these conversations actually have entirely correct answers. The response to most of these issues could probably be “maybe, or maybe not”, and so to write or speak about solutions with absolute certainty in a post-brexit world is probably a bit naive. But what I can currently take from this new landscape is that dialogue is what has been missing for years, and dialogue cannot be continually put aside. Most of humanity shares most of its values, and so much can be gained from simple conversations. To the people saying that they can’t even look at those who voted the opposite way to them, you need to start. Division begins very easily, but can be very hard to break down if left. The separation of “us” and “them” (whatever those categories apply to) has gotten us into this mess and has allowed ambition, greed, hate, a sense of superiority and classism to thrive. If we want those things to pass, we need to stop separation in its tracks.
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