In Brexit chaos, UK eurosceptics see dream ticket: new leader, new deal

[ancianita]

9. I don't get enough real news to know anything but the anti-May news, so I pay attention to books.

Last edited Tue Mar 19, 2019, 06:16 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's what Anand Giridharada says about Brexit in Winners Take All. I'm paraphrasing much of it here.

I've read how Bill Clinton said that the pro-Brexit majority voters wanted to give up aid from the EU, that they had no idea what they were doing, that their vote was an "us v them" false consciousness. He said it at an "influencer" conference of philanthropic folks who hold that good business is win-win and doesn't increase wealth disparity.

But I don't think Clinton, hanging with corporatists, knows who the British "them" actually was.

Giridharada says that Clinton knew but wouldn't acknowledge their internal class struggle with austerity economics. For too long, Brits suffered fiscal "discipline" favored by City of London banker elites and their continental financial counterparts.

They suffered direct cuts to education, health care and reduced mobility; that caused them to wonder how there was always money to help foreigners; and why working class Brits didn't get as much trade benefit with the EU as the EU got.

True, Brits might have started out as racist or xenophobic, when immigrants to the EU easily transited to Britain. But the Brits' vote seemed to come more from economic stresses they felt from Parliament’s zero sum spending. Brits saw they were the only ones living with forced sacrifice, fewer services and less money, unlike their bankers or MPs.

What they stayed angry about -- along with us and millions around the world who'd been attacked for being "tribal" -- was that the austerity was one-sided. That the EU won and they lost.

That things were too good and easy for, and too rigged in favor of elites. British elites -- on TV, internet and in the news' seen living behind gates, in private jets, boats, clubs, getting private health care, private schools, tax havens -- lived like the world's elites. They saw that privatized, stateless people were seen as winners of a system that created unequal accountability in the British way of life. And they were the losers.

Niall Ferguson said the problem was no longer about rich v. poor, Brit v foreigner, but about people who claimed to belong to everywhere versus people stuck somewhere. The problem was about a sense of place. Somewhere people and Everywhere companies. The Somewheres were no longer fooled by the Everywheres love of borderlessness unaccountability belief in the inevitability of market cures for all ills or technological 'progress.' They weren't seeing or feeling those things. They stopped trusting elites. And so their Brexit vote.

Theresa May spoke to that after the Brexit referendum.

Today, too many people in positions of power behave as though they have more in common with international elites than with the people down the road, the people they employ, the people they pass on the street...if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what citizenship means.

Until elites act to unsequester themselves, to balance their global aspirations with local community meetings that require their engagement with messy democratic issues, and live with difference themselves, they will be rejected.

The British people are too smart, their lives more complicated and stressful than to be explained away by elites as ignorant.

And globalists will try to get Brit elites to kick her out for standing up to their disdainful view of Brexit voters, one they self-servingly promote to the world as mere ignorance.

I admit I don't know how the Brexit vote process went. But it's been over for a long time. There are rumors that it got set up the way ours did, but I haven't read enough to be convinced. It just looks to me as if this so-called rock and hard place is one she's been PR maneuvered into. And that Brits are exhausted from dealing with.

After some reading on this, I'm included to sympathize with her and the voters. Brexit was the people's vote. She tries to make the elites of parliament respect their vote. They seem to fight the will of the majority and their referendum rights.

My inclination is to go with May and the original Brits' referendum.

Once Brexit is done, Brits will be able to narrow down who they're dealing with more clearly.

I feel frustrated for them and the unclear info I get every time I read the news. But I'm trying.