Posted on 08/07/2018 4:05:05 PM PDT by oblomov
More than two years have passed since Britain voted for Brexit. Ever since that moment, the vote to leave the European Union has routinely been framed as an aberration; a radical departure from ‘normal’ life. Countless journalists, scholars, and celebrities have lined up to offer their diagnosis of what caused this apparent moment of madness among the electorate. Russia-backed social media accounts. Shady big tech firms like Cambridge Analytica. Austerity. The malign influence of populist ‘Brexiteers’ like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage. The Brexit campaign exceeding its legal spending limit. Or a much-debated claim, written on the side of a bus, that Brexit would allow Britain to redirect its millions of pounds worth of contributions to the EU into its own creaking health service. Typical is a recent piece by a (British) columnist in the New York Times who argues: “Britain is in this mess principally because the Brexiteers—led largely by Mr. Johnson—sold the country a series of lies in the lead up to the June 2016 referendum.”
Britain has produced a Brexit debate that is utterly dry, sterile, and completely lacking in imagination. Much of the commentary has shared three features: an exclusive focus on incredibly short-term factors that apparently proved decisive; a clear and concerted attempt to try and delegitimize the result by implying that either voters were duped or that the Leave campaign was crooked; and absolutely no engagement whatsoever with the growing pile of evidence that we now have on why people actually voted for Brexit. Far from staging an irrational outburst, most Leavers shared a clear and coherent outlook and had formed their views long before the campaign even began.
(Excerpt) Read more at quillette.com ...
This is further confirmation of the parallels between the election of Trump in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK.
Was speaking to an European elite (college law professor) a few days ago. They fear economic hurt from Brexit.
The EU would be a swell idea, if it was just a free trade and customs union and not socialist superstate that wants to let in every migrant ect.
My observations: A key factor in all the Europeon split campaigns (brexit, catalan, etc) is the belief by those who wish to leave that the local government will not address concerns because of rules promulgated by higher levels. Those higher levels then are a combination of hostile to the local concerns or uninterested due to no democratic accountability. Note also that in not a few cases the local government could address those concerns if those in power wanted.
This does not matter, at least not in the UK scheme of things.
The UK is neither a democracy nor a representative republic. The House of Commons is a (more or less) representative body, which has accumulated quite a bit of power, but the Queen in Parliament, which actually makes the laws and governs the country is not obliged in any sense to respond to Vox Pop.
A Civil War was fought nearly 400 years ago to establish once and for all that Parliament, not government or the monarch, is sovereign. How is accountability to the people via the ballot box every five years or less not an obligation to ‘respond to Vox Pop’? It’s a representative democracy, not a direct democracy - and the crude reductionism necessary for a binary-choice referendum vote was a classic example of the impracticability of direct democracy.
The problem for British Populists is that their opposition to the Elites is ‘thought crime’ and their platform can get them put in jail for hate speech and other such crap.
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