BREXIT BLUES

My wife and I are just a few weeks away from being what amounts to il­le­gals in a coun­try (in fact, an en­tire con­ti­nent) where we have lived for the last 4,600 days.

Both of us hav­ing a British par­ent has meant that we’ve been able to have most of the rights and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of a Eu­ro­pean cit­i­zen and our (Aus­tralian only) teenage son has had no legal prob­lem ei­ther.

With Brexit this is all soon to change for us and an es­ti­mated 308,000 Brits in Spain. An­other mil­lion or so across the rest of the Eu­ro­pean Union are set to face the same un­cer­tain sta­tus un­less the British gov­ern­ment fi­nally de­liv­ers on its promise to fully safe­guard its pass­port hold­ers liv­ing in the EU. Quite sim­ply, there is grow­ing alarm, anger and feel­ings of aban­don­ment across this very dis­parate group of in­di­vid­u­als.

But how and why did we get to this point in the first place?

It’s worth re­mem­ber­ing that the cause of Brexit was an ad­vi­sory ref­er­en­dum. It was a pub­lic vote called by for­mer Con­ser­v­a­tive prime min­is­ter David Cameron more than two years ago. He made the ref­er­en­dum hap­pen purely (in his mind) to pre­vent the grow­ing pop­u­lar­ity of UKIP (right-wing anti-Eu­ro­peans) and to shore up his own lead­er­ship in a party with a range of strong opin­ions on Britain being an EU mem­ber.

Cameron did not de­sign this ref­er­en­dum be­cause of pub­lic pres­sure in the United King­dom. In fact, only 37% of the vot­ing pop­u­la­tion ended up choos­ing to cast their vote in favour of leav­ing, though this was al­most 52% of the total vote.

As se­nior EU of­fi­cials have in fact re­cently con­firmed, Cameron be­lieved that his then coali­tion part­ner, the Lib­eral-De­moc­rats, wouldn’t agree to an in/out Brexit ref­er­en­dum. When Cameron won an elec­tion and then found him­self gov­ern­ing with­out the Lib-Dems, his hand was forced by pow­er­ful el­e­ments in his party and the busi­ness sec­tor, de­spite Cameron being pub­licly pro-Eu­rope. Also mis­tak­enly, he ex­pected a vic­tory any­way.

So, the awful mess we are in now was started by the Con­ser­v­a­tives and is being con­tin­ued to this day by the Con­ser­v­a­tives. I am not going to talk about those who pro­moted Brexit with, what Don­ald Tusk rightly called “not even a sketch of a plan to carry it through safely.” I am not going to talk about the count­less thou­sands of work­ing peo­ple who have al­ready lost jobs to Brexit-era clo­sures and re­lo­ca­tions, or about a likely 750,000 more un­em­ployed to come.

I am also not going to talk about the loss to UK schools, hos­pi­tals and ser­vice in­dus­tries of EU na­tion­als, forced out by a gov­ern­ment pur­su­ing a “hos­tile en­vi­ron­ment” pol­icy to­ward im­mi­grants. I could also men­tion those Eu­ro­peans who felt it nec­es­sary to leave Britain be­cause of the greatly in­creased big­otry and dis­crim­i­na­tion against many of them that Brexit has un­leashed.

In­stead, I am going to iden­tify the sin­gle biggest rea­son why the pro-Leave forces won the ref­er­en­dum. Apart from bla­tant lies, scare­mon­ger­ing and run­ning a cam­paign that spent il­le­gally, Boris John­son, Michael Gove and oth­ers took clear ad­van­tage of their own gov­ern­ment’s aus­ter­ity poli­cies.

Mas­sive so­cial wel­fare cuts, hos­pi­tal pri­vati­sa­tion, school bud­gets slashed, starv­ing local coun­cils of fund­ing and large scale vital in­fra­struc­ture being left in ruins. All this to­gether cre­ated sec­tions of the coun­try who were itch­ing to make a protest vote and pun­ish the gov­ern­ment, Eu­rope, im­mi­grants: these were who Leave lead­ers iden­ti­fied as being at fault for what was in re­al­ity the every­day re­sults of the harsh­est forms of aus­ter­ity. This was why Britain needed to “Take Back Con­trol”. This fin­ger-point­ing was enough. That sim­ple slo­gan.

And now today, look at the re­sult.