Why Was Brexit Bad: 4 Points of View
Nearly a decade after the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, I invited journalists, authors, and activists to offer their POVs on Brexit, as we do some 2016 soul searching
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I am living in England in the 1500s. A devotion to all things Mark Rylance has me watching Wolf Hall, a two-season series with a decade in between filming, on the topic of Thomas Cromwell (played by Rylance), King Henry VIII, his wives, heirs, and all the palace intrigue one can pack into a lush and brilliantly written show. One of my university majors was English Literature, and in 2008, I directed a film about young people exploring the soul of Western Civilization through English literature. By traveling to Cambridge, Oxford, and London and visiting the homes of Dickens, Lewis, Tolkien, and the Poet’s Corner in the south transept of Westminster Abbey where Chaucer is buried — along with libraries, both chained and unchained — we all got a brush of the divine.
As I watch Wolf Hall, I recall the books I read in college and begin the thirst for revisiting the Middle Ages, while also being acutely aware of the current reboot of feudalism fever.
I have written about my love for England, the beautiful diversity of London, and my fear of its proximity to the darkness that has fallen on America. And I am constantly returning to 2016 to understand what has happened to democratic countries that once held the hope of freedom for oppressed people everywhere.
2016 was the year of the United Kingdom’s European Union membership referendum, commonly known as Brexit, and the year that Trump first became a White House squatter.
I have written a million words like stars in the sky about what led up to these events, and have dedicated much of my time to understanding information warfare techniques, how propaganda exploits distrust, and how easily democratic nations are manipulated. Foreign nations states were given free access to our minds, and we no have inoculation or protection — as our laws were created in the dark ages and the laws we do have against cyber terrorism are simply never enforced for the vast majority of the populace.
A decade into this fight, I am finding more and more people truth curious — they want to know what happened in 2016. Some want to know why Brexit was bad, others are willing to finally hear the truth about Trump-Russia.
So I thought it might be useful to offer briefings on these subjects — simple posts that can be shared with your networks, as the desire for truth in these times becomes urgent.
For this briefing, I’ll open with my favorite summary from investigative reporter Carole Cadwalldr, written on July 13, 2018:
“Polite reminder: Trump & Brexit are not 2 different things. They are the same thing. Same companies. Same data. Same Facebook. Same Russians. Same Cambridge Analytica. Same Robert Mercer. Same Steve Bannon. Same Breitbart. Same Alexander Nix. Same Donald Trump. Same Nigel Farage.”
As I wrote on June 6, 2019:
“If we want to save our country and be a beacon for global democracies, we’ve got to neutralize Putin. We have to stop Russia’s infiltration or we’ve stopped nothing at all. If we don’t beat ‘em back now, they may not topple us this time, but they’ll get us the next time.”
The next time came and went, and America is looking alarmingly like Russia in the ‘90s, when the oligarchs ran the politicians, resulting in a violent and grossly unequal society.
As I claw my way back through the wreckage of 2016, I look back on Brexit a decade later for clues on how modern democracies consistently abdicated their responsibilities to protect their citizens.
The following quotes are personal observations from sources whose opinions and experience I hold in great esteem.
Why Was Brexit Bad?
Commentary from Anthony Barnett, Matthew Pearce, Keir Giles, and Michael MacKay
A Dying Star
The best metaphor for Brexit is that it is like a super-nova. The dying star of Great Britain exploded in a huge impulse of democratic protest against the way it was governed, that shocked the political universe from Japan to South Africa, and is now imploding into a black hole whose negative gravity is sucking everything into it.—Anthony Barnett, co-founder of openDemocracy, for Bette Dangerous
A Permanent Nonsense Tax
Brexit has functioned as a permanent ‘nonsense tax’ on Britain. The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates UK trade is around 15% lower than if we’d stayed in the Single Market, and productivity 4% lower, meaning slower growth, lower wages, and higher prices. LSE research shows Brexit alone accounts for roughly a third of the UK’s post-2019 food price inflation, a cost families feel every time they shop.
This wasn’t just a British miscalculation or mishap. Brexit was (and still is) championed by a trans-national far-right network (driven by Russia) that also fuelled Trumpism, exploiting social division and corrosive disinformation to weaken democratic alliances. That strategy didn’t end in 2016, we’re living in its consequences.
As Health Secretary Wes Streeting has warned, NHS workers are again facing racism ‘akin to the 70s and 80s.’ That’s the social price of a politics built on scapegoats and false promises. Facing the evidence isn’t about reopening old argument, it’s about stopping the harm and fixing what’s broken.—Matthew Pearce, NAFO founding member, for Bette Dangerous
A Protest Vote Against Westminster
The impact of Brexit was so dire because Britain’s then-ruling Conservative government wished to punish the population for daring to register a protest vote against Westminster. The method of implementation of Brexit that they chose was the most damaging and self-destructive of all possible options: insisting on a radical departure from the EU, while at the same time transposing over into British legislation all of the EU rules and regulations against which the British population had objected in the first place. And then not delivering on the key aspirations of Brexit supporters: such as recovering the capacity for sovereign decisions on issues like immigration.
Since then, there is less doubt of the danger of allowing the British population a truly democratic vote. They had their opportunity, for the first time in a generation, and they seized it – with a result that was shocking for elites in London and Brussels. The likelihood of any repeat is slim: since the British parliamentary election system is fundamentally undemocratic, the chances of Reform transforming its broad public support into seats in parliament are close to non-existent. In the most recent election, Reform polled 14% of the vote, but only gained five parliamentary seats. A more established party, the Liberal Democrats, polled 12% of the vote, but gained 75 seats. Until that system changes, the Brexit vote is probably the last opportunity that the British public will have had to make their feelings known.
Across the UK, people are attaching their own national flags to lampposts as a symbol of protest. That is the kind of thing that is only supposed to happen in countries that are under foreign occupation. So the perception that the UK is dominated by an out of touch elite that does not represent the true interests of the country is still alive and well, even a decade after the Brexit campaign.—Keir Giles, author of Russia’s War On Everybody, for Bette Dangerous
Surrendering a Precious Right
The Brexit era has been notable for a surprising and disappointing immaturity in British political life. It is surprising that a regressive point of view towards Europe took hold in a country that used to be a Great Power. It is disappointing that a slim majority of Britons who voted chose to surrender a precious right they had gained: freedom of movement within the European Union. Also disappointing was the absolute refusal of Labour-Conservative political elites to take seriously Brexit as a Russian active measure – an act of war by fascist Russia against British society and its place in Europe.
England and Scotland gave the world of political thought the genius of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and others. The immaturity of Brexit along with elite capture by Russia is surprising and disappointing.—Dr. Michael MacKay, PhD, political philosophy, London School of Economics, for Bette Dangerous
At the Byline Festival this year, I asked Christopher Steele why we treated information warfare as different from war, like it deserved some sort of exemption from the real thing, when in fact, it steals countries wholesale, and I believe the Russian multi-layered attacks helped tip the scale for Brexit and Trump. He said he believed that Russian interference did tip the scale for Trump, but he said that for Brexit ‘it’s debatable’.
And I think about what Dr. Charles Kriel once said on RadPod. The filmmaker and his wife Kat Gellen directed documentaries on the subject of data and disinformation, focusing on how conspiracy theories are weaponized to radicalize unsuspecting groups of people (think, yoga moms radicalized to become anti-science. You can find their work at Metrotonemedia.com).
He told us that an attempted murderer is still a criminal. I apply that logic to all forms of Russian manipulation.
In a scene from Wolf Hall, Mark Rylance as Cromwell, the King’s fixer, is trying to determine who is behind a rebel uprising.
“Poor men don’t rise without leaders,” he said.
Everywhere we look, we find the fingerprints of Putinists — Elon Musk is little more than an interactive Russian bot.
I see these attacks as part of one war.
As Long As We Are Still Permitted to Think for Ourselves
I first learned about Brexit from a Twitter friend, who began following me after the US 2016 election.
He signed a 2017 petition I created, demanding to see all the dark ads from the Trump campaign’s Project Alamo digital team in San Antonio, Texas; the ads from UK’s Cambridge Analytica, which had staff embedded in San Antonio; and the Internet Research Agency from St. Petersburg, Russia — the misnomered ‘troll farm’ working under Yevgeny Prigozhin, who also headed Wagner, an arm of the Russian military. I wanted to cross reference them for overlap, as I ultimately did in my 2016 election attack investigation series, where I showed how Russia used the same fear-baiting tactics in Brexit as they did in the US.
My Twitter friend was among the first to sign the petition, and he left these words upon signing on
This is about transparency in democracy, political integrity and the future direction of our world and society. A political electoral system that is maintained by lies and misinformation to retain power without having the courage to stand up to scrutiny regarding its claims is an abhorrence which must be nipped in the bud. You have here an opportunity to make a stand for ethics and a set of values in defence of a non totalitarian or repressive regime. You have this power at this juncture. Please use it wisely as eventually your decision will be judged by history as long as we are still permitted to think for ourselves.—May 13, 2017
“... As long as we are still permitted to think for ourselves.”
It’s been a long decade.
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