Angry Brexiters

Brian Cox asks a good question:

The thing I don’t understand about these Conservative MPs is that they are such angry people. They haven’t done badly out of Britain - they aren’t on the receiving end of their own policies. And yet they want to smash everything up. The EU, The Union and now their own party.

It’s no coincidence that many of those he has in mind such as Rees-Mogg and Johnson - though we might add Farage and Banks – come from posh backgrounds. We know that our preferences adapt (pdf) to our circumstances. As Amartya Sen has written, “deprived people tend to come to terms with their deprivation”: Daniel Neff has shown how this is true for some of the poorest people in the world. Just as the poor resign themselves to their wretchedness, however, so too do the wealthy take for granted their privilege. Rather than rejoice in their advantages, they are irked by the small stone in their shoe. Just as the rich banker gets the hump with a £1m bonus if he expected more, so Brexiters are angered by slight (and often imaginary) infringements on their freedom from the EU.

In this sense, demand for Brexit is a little like white male resentment. Both are reactions against challenges to the privileges to which one has become accustomed.

There’s also a sense of entitlement here. Just as posh folk sometimes apply for jobs for which they are ill-suited – most famously David Cameron becoming PM because he thought he’d “be rather good at it” – so they noisily demand the removal of all obstacles to their whims.

All this is in fact at least as old as the Bible. It is mechanisms such as these that give us the Matthew Effect:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

Socialization also matters. If you’ve got so many advantages in life, especially from a young age, you’ll be less aware of the importance of trade-offs – that, for example, academic and career success will estrange you from your family and cause loneliness. You will therefore not be as alive as the rest of us are to the words (pdf) of Isaiah Berlin:

The notion of the perfect whole, the ultimate solution, in which all good things coexist, seems to me to be not merely unattainable – that is a truism – but conceptually incoherent; I do not know what is meant by a harmony of this kind. Some among the Great Goods cannot live together. That is a conceptual truth. We are doomed to choose, and every choice may entail an irreparable loss.

They therefore fail to appreciate sufficiently that there are trade-offs between sovereignty and prosperity, or between controlling our borders and observing the Good Friday Agreement.

Such socialization-induced blindness isn’t however merely the product of upbringing. It’s also the result of recent political history. Throughout their adult lives Brexiters have got what they wanted from politics – lower taxes, the defeat of trades unions and victory of neoliberalism. Even the Labour government did not seriously challenge the power and prestige of the wealthy.

Victory, however, breeds complacency. It led Brexiters to forget what we Marxists have known all along – that there are some interests which the state lacks the will or the capacity to promote. They were therefore unprepared for the hard work of implementing Brexit. They failed to appreciate that politics sometimes requires something more than bluster. Their anger is a form of displacement – attacking others for what are in fact their own inadequacies.

Comments

[Scratch]

"In this sense, demand for Brexit is a little like white male resentment. Both are reactions against challenges to the privileges to which one has become accustomed."

I'm not surprised. (What's left of) these "privileges" are (for the vast majority) less than a lifetime old and required literally unprecedented feats of organisation, sacrifice and resistance to lethal bourgeois power to achieve.

"Get back to the nineteenth century/twenties/thirties you entitled oiks" isn't really a "progressive" position.

[Brian]

Chris, although I feel the overall thrust of what you say is correct as ever, I believe you overlook a nuance in what it means to be “posh”, and a split that has arisen particularly since the 80s in poshness. There is an older tradition of “posh”, which whilst sharing many of the affectatations of “money posh” - clipped voices, boarding schools, U-language, is radically different in outlook. My great uncle epitomized this: as regal as they came, he was ascetic to the core, eschewing any type of comfort. Born and raised in India, he took the surrender of the Japanese in Burma as the only man the Japanese General would surrender to. One of the stories we heard about him was using his only shot of morphine to sedate an injured African colleague, although wounded himself. He spoke fluent Karen, and raised a Karen insurrection against the Japanese. He assumed nothing, was helpful, respectful and saw no class or race. I met a lot of people like him as a young man, and feel they would be aghast at the self-defeating selfishness of the money posh like the Rees-Moggs. I think these people still exist, just about, but their voices are drowned out, as like everyone else, they can’t pay to be heard, and would rather die than know what Twitter is.

[Dave Timoney]

I think poshness is a red herring. The entitlement that the likes of Johnson, Rees-Mogg and others display looks more like a peculiarity of the UK's politico-media milieu. The idea that "Britain is best" and simple will is enough to solve complex problems is the core belief of most of the UK press.

That Michael Gove (a journalist of modest background but much social pretension) is currently weighing up whether he should step in and save the day is evidence that we remain trapped within this delusional environment.

[D]

"They therefore fail to appreciate sufficiently that there are trade-offs between sovereignty and prosperity, or between controlling our borders and observing the Good Friday Agreement."

This strikes me as true of managers* generally. Often they'll look at a situation, plan, proposal etc. and find something that individually be better and be (at time wilfully) blind to the tradeoffs.

*people who are managers because they are (at least perceived to be) good at managing generally, rather than to have expertise relating to the field in which they work.

[Jim]

If you think Brexit was voted for by the wealthy, you're way off beam.......the wealthy voted for Remain, because the status quo keeps them wealthy. The Leavers voted for change precisely because the status quo wasn't good for them. We've had the 'Brexit voters are stupid uneducated dolts' meme chucked at us for the last 2 years, now they're both uneducated dolts AND privileged wealth at the same time.....

I would hazard a guess the average Leave voter earns less and owns less than the average Remain voter, yet you tar the former with the 'wealth and privilege' brush while ignoring the latter.

[Brian]

@ Jim - there’s a growing belief that Brexit was a put-up job by a bunch of hedge fund toffs. Cvnts in other words. Rees-Mogg, Crispin Oder, Peter Cruddas, Michale Hintze, Paul Marshall - and Farage himself. Even the FT is calling out JRM for his curiously aligned political and business interests. What others might call a serious conflict of interest:

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/02/08/2198570/jacob-rees-moggs-huge-personal-windfall-after-brexit/

The view of the young is that Brexit is both a trading opportunity and a means to escape EU tightening of the noose on tax havens. It’s not that the wealthy voted for Brexit, as you point out, they didn’t. What people do increasingly see, as Churchill put it, a lot of hard-faced men doing very well out of the war.

[Dipper]

@Brian - ridiculous. It just insults the lived experience of millions of people. Which side has the voice of big business been consistently on?

[Utterlybgroovy]

@Dipper, the difference is that 'business' wants to be able to continue to run their business and that's far easier if we Remain.
The Rich Leave Funders (RLF?) just want chaos, as that stirs up the market and they make money. It's entirely possible that the RLF voted Leave to stir up the market but didn't actually want to leave the EU. The market was stirred for a couple of years and we drop back into the EU. They've made millions - Crispin Odey made £250M overnight as I recall!
That this disturbance has damaged the UK anyway is probably not an issue for them, but the companies who've already moved, in part or in whole, won't be coming back anytime soon, and it's highly likely that even if we stop Brexit that more will still leave!
Montreal Effect: The Quebecois wanted independence from Canada and fought for a referendum. The got one but didn't win.
Before the Ref Montreal was the Canadian financial centre. Now it's Toronto!

[billb]

There is some evidence that losing the financial sector from the UK economy would be the best thing that could happen to the country.

[Scratch]

"There is some evidence that losing the financial sector from the UK economy would be the best thing that could happen to the country."

There sure is. http://speri.dept.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/SPERI-The-UKs-Finance-Curse-Costs-and-Processes.pdf

[Brian]

@ Dipper: “lived experience” is nothing but the constellation of narratives we live within. And the aforementioned cvnts have invested for 30 years and especially the last 3 in making sure the stories people hear are anti-EU, anti-immigration. How else can one explain the people I’ve met in my parent’s home village (my old mum included) - where there is one Indian family that run the village shop - who tell me we’re being overrun! Being overrun is not their lived experience! I genuinely don’t know if we’ll dodge the Brexit bullet, but either way, there is going to be a reckoning with the media, its owners and the dodgy stories they tell.

[Jim]

"there’s a growing belief that Brexit was a put-up job by a bunch of hedge fund toffs. Cvnts in other words. Rees-Mogg, Crispin Oder, Peter Cruddas, Michale Hintze, Paul Marshall - and Farage himself. Even the FT is calling out JRM for his curiously aligned political and business interests. "

Yes, a handful of private individuals managed to con 17.4m people into voting for something that they otherwise wouldn't have done, and that despite the other side outspending them by a factor of more than 2 to 1 (if you include the Pro-Remain govt mailshot to every householder that just happened to not be included in the referendum spending limits). Somehow all those on the Remain side, despite all the angles of attack they took manged to miss the one thing staring everyone in the face - it was the toffs of course!

[Brian]

@ Jim: (1) as I pointed out in my above post, it’s a very particular type of toff involved in the Brexit heist, (2) it’s misdirection to simply say that Remain outspent Leave, when you also have to factor in the effectiveness of that spending. And it’s pretty bloody obvious that (i) the hedge fund toffs very effectively weaponised the black box that is social media to ensure they got far higher bang for their buck, (ii) exploited the differences between equity and campaign spend to get around funding law (own AIQ technology and then invest your campaign funding money through the platform you built with an equity investment at god knows what cost), (iii) make damn sure we can never really audit campaign spend by washing your ad spend through non-UK entities like Facebook which are totally intransparent anyway. All’s fair in love and politics, and leave fought the more intelligent plan, but let’s not kid ourselves it wasn’t a bunch of cvnts who brought us to this point.

And let’s not pretend ad spend doesn’t work, otherwise millions wouldn’t be hosed at it.

[joe]

@Jim: There is a huge difference between those who organised the Brexit vote and those who voted for it. In the 2010 General Election the EU was as low as 10th on the issues that the electorate was concerned about. How do you think it suddenly rose to being a critical issue in 2016? Essentially the Leave side falsely put all the blame for the real ills in the English Regions and South Wales onto the EU. The EU being the only body to actually fund and help UK regions of deprivation. They took advantage of the total lack of knowledge of how the EU works to spin a web of deceit about the EU. UK actually choses not to control its borders, UK chooses not to control or manage migration. UK choses not to invest in hard hit regions, UK alone decided to not spend sufficiently on NHS, schools, job training, council housing, in work benefits etc. UK shares sovereignty it does not give it away - we have our own money, own defence, own laws, own Courts, are not instructed by anyone in the EC or EU ever, have our own distinct cultures and total freedom to say what we think and travel where we will - we already have total sovereignty. Leave was able to dupe 17.4M that this was not the case and that the 'evil EU' spent its whole time plotting to do the UK down, to rob us, steal our sovereignty and allow Turkish migrant hordes to cross the borders. Leave was able to dupe 17.4M that our EU contribution could be spent on the NHS instead of the truth that for every £ we contribute we get £13 back in extra trade and inward investment into the UK. The truth now turns out to be that we have far less money to pay into the NHS etc and also have to pay £39B in dues to leave the EU - none of that was on the red bus. The majority of Brexit voters remain duped in that they still believe they are going to be better off - no one else believes that and most of the instigators of Brexit know that and have ran away well before the muck hits the fan.

[John D]

may be of interest

https://croakingcassandra.com/2018/11/21/brexit-and-uk-economic-performance/#comments