And now… exhale….
A few days ago I wrote this.
The rage was real, still is real. Since we voted out of the EU, I’ve had friends crying, shouting, serious discussions about whether moving to Scotland is a good idea, eaten a lot of comfort-cake and generally felt a combined sense of a) what the fuck is even the point now combined with b) I need to get involved in politics NOW. The day after the result, I spent a morning just looking for charities and political causes which I felt could speak to values I hold dear, and help promote them. The Green Party still remains high on that list – I just wish they could get their act in order.
But. With a few days to exhale, the anger has settled down to just a steady, aching sadness. I fundamentally and whole-heartedly believe that leaving the EU is a catastrophic error, both for the practical values – already Britain is lurching back towards economic hardship, taking Europe with it – but also for the rejection of cultural values that I think are important. The tragedy of the economic consequences of course will be that many people who voted Leave are going to be heavily affected by the economic downturn – dispossessed communities will find themselves poorer, manufacturing sectors will decline further, the cost of goods increase and the government may yet raise taxes (which I’d be down with, frankly) while squeezing budgets as our GDP declines. The long-term consequences are currently unknown, but I for one would be fearful for the safety of the NHS, as the country gets poorer.
The tragedy of the cultural consequences is that yes, already immigrant populations are feeling threatened, but perhaps as terrible is that it has now be proven – you can win a political campaign by lying. Not 24 hours after the result came in, the Leave campaign had admitted that most of what it said about health and immigration was a lie; and as the EU clamours for us to go so they can carry on without us, even hardened Leavers wobble and twitch over the idea of actually doing it. Because we’re already in trouble and we haven’t even pressed the button yet.
It’s very easy for me to let the anger at all of this turn against people who voted for Leave, but actually with the space to breathe for a few days, I think it would be fairer to turn it against something far more pervasive and sinister in our society.
Firstly, there’s the media. One look at the newspaper shelves in any local store or supermarket, and hate, lies, trivia and malignant bias is splashed across every cover. Lies were printed as truth; hate is promoted as an acceptable social position. The state of British media is horrendous, and it is a national problem, because we no longer have the room for honest, fact-backed debate. Even the BBC, which I still love for its documentaries and podcasts, in its coverage of the news has become disgraceful. Shallow, meaningless reporting which over-simplifies incredibly complicated issues to the point of being false, and an increasing emphasis on entertainment, celebrity and gossip as the only way to get viewers involved – the parochialism of our reporting is horrific. How did we forget that the world was big, and complicated, and difficult, and all these things were important?
Secondly, there’s the embedded neglect of the poor and the dispossessed in society. For years we’ve had austerity, and for years the poverty gap has continued to grow in Britain. The rich now own more than they ever have; the poor have less. All our politicians have done is squeeze harder and harder, cutting access at every level of government,and if you think policies which dispossess the poor in favour of the rich are perfidious, its not half as perfidious as this: that they’ve convinced the country that it’s the only thing to be done.
Somehow these neo-liberal ideas have infested us – that if the rich get richer, some of their wealth will ‘trickle down’ to us; that the markets always know best; that government should function on a business model; that people do the best when they do for themselves; that laws protecting worker’s rights and the rights of the individual, as compared to laws protecting the companies and that corporate tax are both somehow bad. And that any alternative model is frankly impossible, laughable.
For nearly thirty years, we have laboured under this presumption. Even the Labour government was infested with it, and we are still paying for that folly. The markets know best; companies know best; the presence of the super-rich always enhances the economy, even when they take their monies overseas and pay no taxes, and their wealth does not, in fact, trickle down to the ever-growing poor.
And now we’ve had the EU referendum, and the country is hurting, and in its hurt, it both lashed out against Westminster, but also it accepted this orthodoxy once again, embraced the premise of the lie, and seeing no alternative way to stop the hurt, voted against the EU.
And I am still angry. Nor do I accept the idea that as the government withdraws ever further from actually governing, from spending taxes to improve the lives of its citizens, that the people will or should step up to fill the void, because frankly if the history of the world shows anything it’s that for every Bill Gates foundation or Elon Musk spending their money for the betterment of mankind, there are another 1000 billionaires sitting on their yachts who don’t, and the problem is too big to leave to individuals.
However, I think if anything comes of this, it is an opportunity to finally push back against this pervasive, bullshit neo-liberal orthodoxy. For thirty years we have been the subject of its experiment, and for thirty years the evidence has come back in through the prism of our lives – and the evidence is no. It does not work. It never has, except for the super-rich. The time has come to change the story.
