Anyone who has witnessed the aftermath of a super typhoon in countries such as the Philippines or seen the devastation caused by the hurricanes that occasionally ravage the Caribbean and southern US would readily recognise the dramatically altered political, economic and social landscape of the United Kingdom following last week’s thunderous vote to leave the European Union.
The damage caused by this constitutional mega-storm is ubiquitous, unquantifiable and, in some key instances, irreparable. The political establishment, including the leaders of the two main parties, David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn, and the Brussels hierarchy, was squashed flat. The hitherto dominant influence of the City, big business, financial institutions, the US government, international watchdogs such as the IMF and myriad economic experts was contemptuously blown aside.
The referendum campaign held up a mirror to the face of modern Britain and on Thursday, the glass cracked. It revealed a deeply divided and broken land, grievously separated by income, age, education, nationality and geography. Although some broad benefits may accrue from leaving the EU in the longer term, the mirror showed a country that, through an act of self-destruction, now looks destined, unless we are both extremely vigilant and extremely lucky, to become by stages poorer, weaker, lonelier and uglier.
The Observer vigorously campaigned for a Remain victory, believing it represented the surest path towards a fairer, progressive and inclusive society. We are now embarked on an uncertain road, with unreliable guides, across a radically changed and much-scarred landscape. Leave’s victory must be accepted. It is vitally important that all the opposing parties pull together to tackle the challenges ahead, but the dire and still unforeseen consequences of that decision must not be minimised.
Uncertainty and instability are the new watchwords, the new zeitgeist for a post-European future. They will be with us for some considerable time to come. For this debacle, David Cameron must take a chunk of blame. In many ways a successful leader, and a reformer in unlikely fields such as gay rights, Cameron was never a man for detail. He won two general elections almost by default. He narrowly survived his 2014 gamble over Scottish independence. Panicked by Ukip’s rise and squeezed by Tory backbenchers in 2013, he promised an EU referendum without sufficient thought for the consequences. Last week, his luck ran out.
Cameron’s sad fate is to be for ever remembered as the prime minister who presided over Britain’s definitive rupture with Europe, unintentionally wrecked decades of internal and external EU bridge-building, gladdened the hearts of potential predators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and flummoxed our most important ally, the US. He may also go down in history as the man who triggered the break-up of the United Kingdom, given the near certainty of a second Scottish independence referendum within two years. For a Conservative supportive of the status quo, it is quite a record.
Jeremy Corbyn emerges from this fiasco in scarcely better condition and his future as party leader now looks precarious. The Labour leader’s late entry into the campaign, his narrow focus on issues such as workplace rights, his woeful lack of a bigger, energising vision of Britain’s place in the world and his barely disguised, personal Euroscepticism prevented him giving the lead the Labour movement badly required.
Crucially, Corbyn appeared unable to accept that hostility to immigration, like it or not, had become the campaign’s key issue. Yesterday, he belatedly accepted the need to have this debate – too little, too late. He failed to assuage Labour voters’ fears, both justifiable and illogical. Unconvinced, they defected to Leave in decisive swaths in the north and east of England. Corbyn, as the aftershocks come thick and fast and an autumn snap general election looms, may not have much time left.
Cameron and Corbyn’s blunders are far from the whole story. The broken mirror held to Britain’s face revealed an electorate that, in many respects, was more preoccupied with its own particular grievances and fears than with any of the EU’s supposed depredations. Towards the end, the campaign, almost, was not about the EU at all. It was about alienated voters, fractured communities, under-resourced public services, failing schools and hospitals, low wages and zero-hours contracts – and the seething, hitherto repressed anger of so many people who feel they have been left behind.
In its final weeks, the referendum debate bypassed Brussels. The national conversation was about ourselves and the sort of country we want and have become in the postwar, post-60s baby-boomer decades. It was about national identity, about the north-south divide, about the gulf between the well-off and the poor, about austerity cuts and welfare policies that destroy hope and break families, about a long history of societal disintegration and decay.
The vote’s context dated back to the days when Margaret Thatcher declared that society did not exist and to her discriminatory brand of class warfare that left industrial regions in the north-east, south Wales and elsewhere lacking a living, a future and self-respect.
The referendum became an opportunity to make grassroots anger felt in a way that could really hurt a perceived uncaring, unresponsive political elite. So what if the IMF warned we will get poorer? For too many, it could not get much worse. So what about globalisation? How have free markets benefited the steel worker put out of work by the EU-sanctioned dumping of cheap Chinese products? Seen from Wearside or the Welsh valleys, booming London and the south-east, with its Monopoly money property prices and £70 a head restaurants, resembles Goldrush City, a foreign and hostile land.
Does anybody in Westminster understand or even care? No, not really, so these alienated voters seemed to believe. As Nicola Sturgeon said in one of the televised debates, if you cannot find a nursery place for your child, if you have to wait weeks to see your GP, if family benefits have been trimmed again or your grownup children cannot afford a place to live, don’t blame Poles or Bulgarians and other EU immigrants. Don’t blame Syrian refugees or similar unfortunates. Blame a Tory government that has favoured the suburban middle classes and repeatedly cut services and imposed austerity programmes at the expense of the least well-off.
But Sturgeon’s commonsense pleading was ignored except, evidently, in Scotland. Nor did the Remainers in Downing Street show any greater understanding of the divisions souring the country’s heartlands. For this complacency and obliviousness they too are to blame. With hindsight, the outcome became inevitable. In their fury and despair, England’s ignored and dispossessed millions put the boot in. They relished a chance to hit back. And perhaps, for a few days, they will feel better for it.
It is not a feeling that is likely to endure since the leaders of the Brexit campaign have little or no idea how to proceed, let alone how to deliver their numerous, irresponsible promises. How long before Leave supporters start to complain they have been conned?
The Daily Mail yesterday declared on its front page a victory for “the quiet people of Britain” who rose up against an “out-of-touch political class”. It is wrong. There is nothing quiet about it and the transferring of the keys to Number 10 from one old Etonian to another hardly represents a rebuke to the political elite.
But that will surely follow when the “quiet people” realise that Leave’s vacuous slogans and empty promises (NHS spending up? Nigel Farage has already disowned that. A radical decline in immigration? Daniel Hannan has now said that won’t happen) won’t deliver the economic salvation they were promised. The quiet people – urged on, no doubt, by the same paper’s corrosive cynicism – will soon turn on the new “elite”. For 30 years, the “left-behind” (the working poor, the “strivers”, the zero-hours workers) have waited for a new economic reality based on fairness and equality to rebalance the effects of late capitalism as it advantaged a smaller and smaller number of people with grotesque income inequalities. This time, they were led to believe that a correction was at hand. Not from these Leavers it isn’t. And no one should be surprised if they next vent their anger when it turns out that Leave’s cure-all turned out to be a mendacious chimera. “Take back control”? They just might.
The Leave team privileged outdated notions of sovereignty above all else, blind to how global economies and companies now function. This isolationism will do even greater harm to the very people to whom they made this appeal. ‘Take your country back’ they claimed. But now watch as those who led the campaign - and their like - escape the economic fallout visited on the poorest and the most vulnerable. Take your country backwards, more like.
One of Leave’s campaigners in chief, Boris Johnson, has so far been deeply unimpressive. Having won, Cameron’s presumptive successor initially declined to say anything at all. When he did, he played for time. It may be that he is daunted by the heavy responsibilities that are now his. Or he may simply not be up to the job.
Michael Gove, another leading Brexiter, seems to have been playing a complicated political chess game with himself. Having won, apparently to his surprise, how will he manage the consequences? He offers no clue.
Nigel Farage, nobody’s idea of a future government minister, seems meanwhile to have been counting on Cameron selflessly dealing with the consequences of Ukip’s destructive, anti-Europe iconoclasm until the party’s Tory allies felt ready to supplant him. Cameron rightly made plain on Friday he will not play the patsy for posturers.
Farage’s declaration of a historic independence day was as fatuous as it was embarrassing. He and friends ran an often scurrilous and dishonest campaign, sometimes tipping into outright racism and xenophobia. Their behaviour let down the majority in the Leave camp who, for respectable reasons, wanted to quit the EU. Yet despite Farage’s antics, the result represented a coming of age for Ukip.
As the political scientist Rob Ford notes: “Cameron called the referendum in order to see off the Ukip revolt. Instead, after a vote that drew the largest turnout in a UK election for 20 years, it is the rebels who have seen off the prime minister. The Ukip rebels... have delivered perhaps the largest shock to European politics since the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
The campaign, however viewed, is history. A pressing question now is how will its legacy be dissipated? Leave supporters will have questions. How long before any concrete dividends from EU withdrawal are felt? How long before the fabled £350m a week supposedly sent to Brussels is redistributed among British hospitals and schools? How long before the North Sea fisheries are restored, those shady Turks repulsed, EU migration halted or many other rash and mendacious Brexit promises fulfilled?
It would be wise not to hold one’s breath. The fact that the Brexiters seem so utterly unprepared is deeply worrying. At very real risk is Britain’s future economic wellbeing, its trade and exports, its jobs and incomes, its social cohesion and its reputation and standing in the world. The markets do not stand still. Brussels is already pushing for a quick divorce.
This week, EU leaders will hold a summit, for the first time excluding Cameron. Already, moves are afoot to move lucrative European financial services centres from London to Frankfurt or Paris. The French are ready for a tough fight over the terms of separation. What have Johnson and Gove and the rest to say about all this, except to claim there is no hurry? The stakes could hardly be higher.
For the EU itself, the future is highly uncertain and unstable, too. Some leaders fear contagion and back a tough exit negotiation with Britain to discourage further defections. Others, such as Germany’s Angela Merkel, may be more inclined towards compromise, not least because of the value of Anglo-German trade.
Yet despite numerous solemn declarations by EU leaders that Europe will learn the lessons of the British vote, address the democratic deficit and make Europe work better for its citizens, there is little evidence so far of a purposeful drive to change the way the union functions. That has to change. Unless the EU can reform itself in fundamental ways, extreme nationalists and xenophobes stand ready to exploit that arrogance.
The EU, possibly the greatest democratic achievement of the postwar era, is in fatal peril. Its collapse, and the dangerous chaos that would ensue, could yet prove to be the Brexit hurricane’s most destructive consequence.
