BREXIT STAGE LEFT

[defrog]

It’s official: the UK has decided to leave the EU. (Or, as Fox News calls it, “The UN”.)

I haven’t had much to say about the Brexit, mainly because – like a lot of people – I’d assumed it wouldn't actually happen. Well it has. So here’s my official blog post on it as required by the One World Bloggery Association:

1. One illustrative point: according to Google, around the time that the polls closed, its search engine saw a +250% spike in searches for “what happens if we leave the EU”.

NOW they ask.

2. And since they’re asking, Vox has a good summary here.

The Economist also has some worthwhile commentary on this.

The upshot is that the actual Brexit will take a couple of years, but the short-term impact of uncertainty will hurt the country’s economy, and the long-term impact could be even worse, depending on how the negotiations go and who’s in charge of them on the UK side.

Also, while I think the UK – or at least England – might survive the Brexit, ultimately there is no real upside – unless you believe what Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage say about how Britain’s economy will be awesome. Which the fact-checkers say you shouldn’t. But fact-checkers, what do THEY know, eh?

3. But then it was never really about the economy anyway. It’s pretty clear that for UKIP, it was mainly about immigrants. Basically, a lot of Brits are freaked out by the surge in migrants, and Boris and Nigel have exploited that xenophobia and convinced them that the answer to their problems is to leave the EU, kick out the foreigners and make Britain “Great” again.

4. Which may sound familiar to those of you living in America. Or Texas.

5. To be fair, not everyone who voted “Leave” is a xenophobic racist. Some people said they supported the Brexit because they felt the EU is undemocratic. I suspect at least some of them said that because it sounds better than “I hate foreigners”. But like most of the other claims the “Leave” campaign made, it’s not really true – not to the extent that it justifies leaving. The EU has many many problems, but it’s not the dictatorship Nigel Farange makes it out to be.

6. Meanwhile, it turns out at least some of the people who voted “Leave” only did it as some kind of half-assed protest and didn’t seriously think their side would win. Oops!

7. But for the most part, UKIP won the referendum by (1) exploiting prejudiced and ignorant attitudes towards foreigners, and (2) citing economic justifications that were based on blatantly false and easily debunked pretenses. It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this – just about all of the Leave camp’s claims about the EU were outright wrong, and it didn’t take a lot of effort to prove they were wrong, and people voted for them anyway.

This to me is more important than whether the worst-case Brexit scenarios actually happen. They may be overblown. We’ll find out eventually. What’s not overblown is that a blatant appeal to racist xenophobia paid off for the instigators. That speaks volumes about the current state of the UK. Even if the “Remain” side had been on the winning side of that thin margin, UKIP has already succeeded in letting every immigrant in the UK know how roughly half of the population feels about them.

The fact that D. Trump got himself the presidential nomination more or less the same way speaks volumes about the current state of America. Whether he wins or not, there are consequences, because a Hillary victory won’t change those attitudes towards foreigners.

BONUS TRACK: By the way, here’s some photos from 1975, the last time the UK had a referendum about leaving the EU. Notice how Margaret Thatcher is in favor of staying.

Anarchy in the UK,

This is dF