Euroshambles '16

June 28, 2016

IT SEEMED perfectly appropriate that the arrogant and clodhopping English football team should lose to the minnows of Iceland just two days after the nation itself voted to become far less than the sum of its parts: the Brexit decision was, after all, an overwhelmingly English one, even if the Welsh, Northern Irish and Scots will also pay the price.

The dismal football performance was, of course, the lesser ignominy, but it felt all of a piece. “Our reputation on and off the field is as low as it gets right now,” said a TalkSport commentator.

I happened to be in middle England when its citzens voted to leave the European Union on June 26. I got a sense of Britain in crisis: a sense of a country ill at ease, a fragile rural and suburban gentility festooned with Union Jacks and “Leave” posters, pretending that a decoupling from Europe will somehow resolve all its problems - its stresses and discontents, its feeling of being left behind.

The “Leave” campaign clearly had the visceral appeal. John Harris in the Guardian said that the referendum is not solely about Europe, but also concerned Britain’s growing identity crisis. Behind it all, the simple and easily digestible ideas about running out of room, about being under strain, seem to mean more than abstract concepts like sovereignty, which is unlikely ever to be fully restored in a globalised economy.

John Lanchester also explains in the London Review of Books that Britain’s prosperity as a whole - measured in abstract concepts like GDP - was a chimera that led to the immiseration of its white working class, who lashed out by voting for an outcome that will immiserate them still further.

There has always been a strong a left-wing case for Brexit, but it was always clear that this vote against Europe is bound to strengthen the xenophobic Right and the opportunists seeking to harness it. This has already got nasty, with the murder of Jo Cox, but it could get nastier.