In the 2016 Referendum I voted to Remain and I was very angry with those who voted Leave, believing them to be ill informed and knee jerk. I was not at all surprised with the vote but was depressingly resigned to how it would go. Owen Jones had predicted a Leave vote and it was clear to me that the pendulum had already swung that way so I was in very sombre mood when I made my mark on the ballot paper. I felt that my vote counted for nothing.
It’s that feeling of powerlessness that is at the heart of what I am writing here and, ironically, that feeling was the driving force that gave us the 52:48 result. While there was certainly a racist, nationalist element to the Referendum (indeed it was the rise of nationalism and its threat to the Tory vote that inspired Cameron to call the Referendum), the unifying strand running through the Leave campaign was that of giving the finger to the establishment (whatever that might mean).
The visible failure of the neoliberal experiment that began in the 1970’s inspired a progressive movement on the left and a rise in nationalism on the right, in which both groups attacked those who controlled the money and worked in concord to control world politics. It wasn’t a conspiracy, it was simply the logical conclusion of a capitalist system where power and wealth (two sides of the same coin) formed coalitions of self interest in which human…
