Brexit: Money talks, hatred motivates, and fear corrupts, you didn’t stand a chance.
I’ve kept my views on Brexit to myself for quite a while but yesterday I decided to get it all out of my system, this is the result.
It amazes me this talk of betrayal by Brexiteers. As if the idea of leaving a multi-country organisation was going to be a walk in the park and we’d all be shitting gold and vomiting rainbows by now. You’re not in Kansas anymore Dorothy. The echo chamber which fostered ideas based on your fears scooped you up from your perceived margins of society and made you feel like you were part of something bigger, something better, and now that has gone. Its walls were paper thin, much like its leaders and its structural integrity. You were played. You were a realm of naïve knights led to battle by a counsel of radicals who didn’t care at all about “the will of people.”
When the deed was done and they’d successfully made you vote against your best interests, against the country’s best interests, yours and your children’s and the young people coming up’s best interests, like rats off sinking ships they left you. One by one they fled, ideas routed left and right, facts illuminated their fiction and the arch narrative was scattered to the wind, but the damage was done.
They offered a magical golden carrot on a stick and said “walk on donkey, walk on” and you did, you marched lockstep and you raised up your voices, and you went to the booths and on the altar of bad ideas, you passionately martyred yourselves, all the while dreaming of that golden carrot and how wonderful it would be to have it.
Now you talk of betrayal, while your brother and sister countrymen think the same of you. It was a betrayal of our future that you voted for, but we get it. We understand that you were played for fools, led astray and manipulated by people who didn’t care for or about you in any meaningful way whatsoever. Money talks, hatred motivates, and fear corrupts, you didn’t stand a chance. Once they had manipulated the spectre of fear to feel like a threat to you personally, they had you, and they could use you, and you did their bidding, because anything else would have seemed irrational, would have seemed counterintuitive, entrenched in their narrative of fear you waged war for warped notion, of a warped nation’s greater good.
Now your faces are red and you’re angry and you talk of marching, lest we remind you these self-same acts you decried us for doing when you achieved your pyrrhic victory. It’s not a good feeling, is it? It doesn’t feel right in the pit of your stomach, does it? When the ideas you fought so hard for turned out not to be your own. When the winds of change wrenched the kite from your fingers and hope went floating off into the murky sky above, you stood there cold, disparaged, fearful, angry and alone. Truly this was the moment of betrayal.
The government, as much as I am no great fan, have had to work with the situation that you put them in. You forced that hand that feeds to turn its attention to the pen and re-write the chapters of progress we had been striving for. How dare you. How dare you say you didn’t vote for this! What hollow protest, where is that steel spine that binds you to your values and your ideas, how low and limp your carry yourself now that your ideas have been realised. Theresa may or may not deliver a deal that works for all, but you did this. You caused this.
You believed the spending lies when the soundbites were delivered to you in easy to parrot form, you shared the images of the bus, you believed the vicious hateful lies about immigrants. One by one the arguments fell, each one debunked in turn by data, by evidence, the truth will out, but the damage was done. The ideology poisoned your minds and your hearts to the core, they convinced you that experts in the field knew nothing and were conspiring against you. Now I am not the one to so readily ignore the fallacy of blindly accepting authority, but when undeniable evidence is presented to you, to sally forth with ignorance and arrogance is greater folly still.
You believed the lies, the conspiracy, the fearmongering, whilst they projected “Project Fear” onto anyone that would speak out against these bad ideas. You didn’t stand a chance. When your opponent is branded as fear itself, some great darkness, why on earth would you leave the warmth and light of the echo chamber? You were taught to fear the opposition, you were put in the position of being Pavlov’s dog, conditioned and motivated to react to a stimulus, until it became second nature, salivating over the notion that we might be a smaller entity, insulated from the perceived threat of European control.
They made you long for control over factors and aspect of life which we already had. We were always sovereign, we have always had control over our borders. Treating immigrants as “the other” as if the mere idea of being from another country, with another language, culture and customs, somehow excludes them from the conversation. On whose backs were our country’s built? Who readily and willingly do the jobs you view to be beneath you? Yeah, that’s right, immigrants. You would rather keep a hard-working honest person out of a job to satisfy your prejudice than see somebody take on a role that contributes to society because they don’t conform to your notion of what being a citizen of this country looks like. If you won’t do the job and don’t even apply for it in the first place, then your opinion of who can and who will is rendered moot. It’s like saying this:
“You can’t have this job!”
“…because you’re not from here!”
“Are you going to apply for the job then?”
“Well no, but I just don’t want you to have it”
“I’m going to apply for the job”
“They’re taking our jobs! Jobs us native people should be doing! What will us native people do now that all these foreigners are coming over here taking our jobs?”
...and the cycle continues, media and figures rise to prominence on the backs of these wrongheaded beliefs and once enshrined as leaders and voices of the downtrodden, disparaged and disheartened masses they help to lead the charge, motivating people and fostering dangerous ideas which can only lead to separation, isolation, insolation, violence and deeply divisive mentalities which keep alive the ingroup-outgroup nature of the conflict, which does not need to exist at all.
If only we would lay down our arms and learn to work with each other, appreciate our differences, not raising up in opposition to them, because it will only ever do us wrong, do us as a people a disservice. We all bleed the same, we all live our lives wanting for more, anger is the weapon of the hope in the hands of a betrayed army, led by a general who does not have their best interests at heart.
We can have a future to be proud of as a nation, despite our mistakes, despite the crimes of the past and the weaponised fear of the present. It begins at home, whatever that home may look like, however your family structure is defined. It starts with conversations about day to day life at the dinner table. It progresses to sharing and helping spread those ideas with your neighbours and community, helping others as you would like them to help you, and when those ideas come into conflict, resolving them in a manner that works for everyone, being willing to accept a compromise for the betterment of all rather than the needs of the individual and in so doing raising up the collective rather than subjugating groups or minority voices.
It is my contention, that should it come down to it and a People’s Vote is the outcome, that we should elect to stay in Europe and instead educate the masses on the benefits of working together and being part of something bigger, rather than demonising something the vast majority of people don’t understand as some boogie man in Europe. The people who caused Brexit simply capitalised on fear and misunderstanding to fan the flames of division in the first place. The best way to inoculate yourself against these bad ideas is to educate yourself so they can’t manipulate you into making such country ruining decisions ever again. You have the world’s knowledge at your fingertips, fact check, find other sources, reliable sources, do not simply accept what people tell you at face value. Form your own opinion based on where the evidence leads you. Tony Benn once said:
“I think our most powerful weapon is education… because if people knew what was happening they wouldn’t accept what was happening, so education is the core of it, and the reason why we’re pressure on education is the government doesn’t really want the public to know, because if they did know and understand what was going on there would be big changes. …what we should do is have meetings… where we bring together people of different experience and make it a form of understanding. I’m old now and the older I get the more I realise every single generation has to fight the same battles again and again and again. There’s no final victory and there’s no final defeat, and therefore a little bit of history may help. 80 years ago this year when I was 3, I was introduced to a Labour MP, didn’t see him again for 7 years. Next time I saw him he had a black shirt in parliament square and he was Oswald Mosley, he had been a Labour MP and became a factory suit and I did meetings with my dad, broken up by fascists in the 1930s and I had bought Mein Kampf when I was 11, Hitler’s book and one phrase in it stuck in my mind, Hitler said:
“Democracy inevitably leads to Marxism”
now you work that one out. What he recognised was that if people knew what was going on, and people organised and had the right to organise, then things would change in a way he did not want; and from the simple lesson, I won’t go back to basics, but, I mean the truth is this country and the world have been run by rich and powerful men from the beginning of time. It began with slavery, they owned the workers and the land. If any slave objected he was flogged or hanged and that kept them in order and the only real wealth in the world is land and resources that lie under it and the people, they are the real source of wealth!
And until really quite recently working people had no rights at all. In 1834 which is only about 90 years before I was born only about 2% of the population had the right to vote and they were all rich men, women didn’t have the right to vote at all. And out of Trade Unionism came the change. The Chartists for votes for men, the Suffragettes for votes for women, the Trade Union movement wanted representation in parliament, Labour Party was formed adopted a socialist programme and that was the first real change! And of course when the slump occurred in the 1930s… Hitler used the Jews and the Communists as an excuse to get into power, and he said to them, ‘give me the votes, give me power’ said Hitler ‘I’ll give you jobs’ he did give them jobs; put half of the unemployed in the army, the other half in the factories and there was another war and we lost 105 million people in two world wars 1914 to 1945 and that was the price of Capitalism and Imperial competition.”
The leaders within the pro-leave lobby used “project fear” in much the same dehumanising and othering way that Hitler used anti-Jew and anti-Communist propaganda (I’m not saying they are identical but the approach is undeniably similar) to rally people behind the notion that “the other”, in the case of Brexit “Remainers” rebranded as “Remoaners” and more perniciously immigrants branded as a plague infesting our country and ruining it, were the tools with which they were able to construct a narrative of a powerless country that was controlled by an evil entity which was out to get us at every turn and of course sold in that easy to swallow form, lacking nuance and understanding of the mechanisms behind how it all worked people bought it hook line and sinker.
It is far easier to paint the image of an underdog and elicit sympathy for its cause than to invest time into understanding a complex idea that is in your best interests. Once you control the emotions of the uneducated masses, you can destroy anything by appealing to those emotions. By its very nature emotion is irrational, that’s why in debate and discourse once a person snaps and loses their cool and results merely to insulting their opponent (referred to as ad hominem ‘to the person’ attack) the discussion in any meaningful sense is over, reason has been sidelined. That is not to say at all, that the individuals motivated into an irrational state are themselves without reason or irrational people, just that the narrative constructed around them is one where descent from the ideology is not tolerated at any cost and any attempt to do so, is efficiently converted into fuel for their fire by those that seek to weaponise the fear that they have invested their time and energy into fighting against.
Be wary of the narratives you are sold, read more stories than the ones you’re recommended by friends, family and the institutions you are a member of. See the darkness within your politics and the darkness within the politics you oppose, acknowledge it and acknowledge the good ideas in both sides also. If you find yourself automatically dismissing all the ideas of the people who you find yourself in opposition to, that alone should be enough for you to question if you are thinking for yourself or have fallen victim to a narrative which you are not in control of. Think for yourself at all costs, or all costs will be thought for you and you’ll be a victim of your own making.
Crossbench peer Lord Lisvane delivered a rather apt Brexit analogy:
“It is as though I have three elderly and extremely nervous aunts, of whom I’m very fond. I decide to give them a treat and ask them to discuss what they would like to do. So, they have a discussion and they arrive at a democratic solution, which is that they would like to go to the cinema tomorrow. So, I look in the local paper and I discover that the only films on offer are Reservoir Dogs and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. What am I then to say to my highly nervous and indeed squeamish but much-loved aunts? You must stick with your democratic decision, or do I say, now you know what’s on offer, what do you think?”
and I’ll leave you with the words of Caroline Lucas addressing a crowd of people in the rain in Brighton:
“People keep talking about 'The Will of The People' but the bottom line is that: A vote of the people cannot undermine the will of the people, it is about the people’s wishes and if people still wanna leave that's what people can vote for in a People's Vote. We believe that we have all the evidence, more and more people are now recognising that they were not given the full facts two years ago.
You know Sarah Wollaston the Tory MP always speaks very powerfully about the idea of informed consent. You know if you’re going to have an operation, then you’d quite like to know whether or not they’re going to sort of bandage your toe, or cut your leg off, and if you decide that you actually don’t want to have your leg cut off on balance then that is your right to say ‘hang on a minute, that’s not what we discussed.’ There are so many things we know now that we didn’t know two years ago.
No one was telling us two years ago that the government would be stockpiling food and medicine, that people from the NHS would be leaving our NHS because they don’t feel welcome or that people wouldn’t be coming to our NHS to work here in the first place. I just want to say a special word particularly here in Brighton, to all of our friends and our families and our loved ones who are from other EU member states, I can only apologise for the way you’ve been treated it is absolutely unacceptable to use your lives as some kind of bargaining chip for the negotiations. The Green Party has always said we proudly stand up for free movement, we welcome it, we champion it, we think it is a wonderful thing, to study and to travel and to live and to love in 27 other EU member states. Why would we not want to extend that and enable our kids to enjoy that too? Rather than to close down their horizons.
So I want you to please keep going, don’t give up now despite the rain, we’re getting incredibly close to this. We know her deal is going to go down next Tuesday and there’s all the signs that more and more people in parliament and more and more people outside of parliament are recognising that right now the way forward is through a people’s vote. So thank you and just keep it up and look forward to eventually getting there when we do.”
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