17 days later: Brexit, angry grief and Pickwick’s Fat Boy

Within 24 hours of the Brexit vote I’d had 30 questions from the American side of my family and various American friends. Why did we do it? Is it a Trump-style uprising? Is the atmosphere on the streets like 28 Days Later or Germany in 1933?

To take those in order: I said it’s complicated; probably not, though it does have some cousins in common; no, though some of my friends seem to want it to be because like the Fat Boy in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, they “wants to make your flesh creep” — or have their flesh crept.

If I had to pick an atmosphere that I was reminded of, it’d be London 1997, after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales*. Some people seemed almost hysterical or even seized by some strange feyness, there was a sort of angry grief among the most vocal Remain voters, some were eager to make this into their own psychodrama, and then there were plenty of people going about their ordinary business without seeming much troubled. Everyone seemed surprised.

If you only took your impressions from social media you’d have thought there was no place for any response between “Poles out!” and “Old chavs out!”.

A number of people, including some of my friends, thought that they’d woken up the day after the vote to find that they were living in a malignantly insular, more-or-less racist, possibly proto-fascistic, country. How could almost 52% of a large voter turn-out choose the wrong side? They must have been xenophobes, bigots, or misinformed, or moronically incapable of processing information correctly; perhaps all of these things.

It was easy enough to find people to confirm these notions by speaking stupidly and nastily, while some seized on incidents of racial abuse and violence with a mix of anguish and eagerness — ­see?

Undoubtedly there were places of darkness in the campaign.

There had been themes that US voters would recognize: jobs, declining living standards, elites, a sense of loss (“where’s my country gone?”), making the country great again, immigration — above all, immigration — and so on. The campaigning was generally dismal and sometimes ugly in a way that US voters would also recognize. Outlandish promises and predictions were made in a sub-Trumpian manner. The voting split notably on socio-economic and educational lines. It was also labelled old vs young and metropolitan vs the rest. And, some would have you believe, nice vs nasty. But as much as these things counted for something, they didn’t count for everything.

What if the debating points and “facts” from the campaign weren’t all that important? What if, as with Trump, it’s more a question of liking and disliking, and bewilderingly resistant to argument and information?

There may have been people who voted to leave because they believed that the EU was going ban fish and chips, or believed Leave’s assurances that voting out would solve every great problem and lead us to the sunlit uplands of future greatness, or bought into this or that idea about immigration, but I suspect that none of these things were decisive in themselves.

You couldn’t win a referendum with a substantial turn-out in the UK if you only appealed to the credulous, the angry, the vicious and militant flag-botherers. Something must have persuaded enough people in the middle, and the people in the middle are not generally hateful or fools. After the vote, an ICM poll** for British Future (a non-partisan liberal thinktank) suggested that 84% of the British public want all current EU migrants to be allowed to stay in Britain, with 77% of Leave supporters being in favour of this.

Older voters in particular have a long acquaintance with the EU, they have known it for decades and have built up an impression of it as an entity, as they might a person, or a bank, or a company they deal with. Do they do what they say they’ll do, are they well disposed towards me/us, will they stay in business, if they’re flawed will they change, do they mean well to the world, do I like them? This prejudice, intuition, or what you might call cumulative or incremental opinion has been part of every EU debate I can remember, and it has shifted over time.

Many Britons just don’t quite trust the EU, while it makes many uneasy and some hate it. Many of those who once liked or at least unthinkingly accepted it have slowly fallen away. Where once it was associated in some vague way with progress and the future, well, so was the Soviet Union. There was a time when we were told that we should join the Euro; to refuse was to be like the WW I generals who tried to use horse cavalry in an age of machine guns. No one says that now and perhaps with hindsight the Eurozone disaster was the clincher. The EU was no longer a more-or-less likeable or objectionable but inevitable entity, and its incompetence was no longer accidental — the usual bureaucratic tales writ large — perhaps it was fundamental, after all. The sense of momentum was gone.

On top of that, everyone on all sides has agreed for as long as I can remember that the EU has grave flaws and needs to be reformed. Older voters, who are more likely to have voted Leave, albeit in a more complicated picture than is sometimes suggested, will recall that reform has been floated in different ways for 30 years. Thatcher tried to do it by belligerence; Tony Blair said he would achieve it by being nicer and more cooperative; David Cameron said he’d renegotiate and then present the new deal to the public in a referendum, with the threat of withdrawal if the result was unsatisfactory. Not much happened.

Behind the arguments and the “facts” and the embarrassingly dismal campaigns, this is what has informed the debate for many people. Anything like a generous response to Cameron’s last attempt, some meaningful acknowledgment that British concerns mattered, might have meant a different result, but now it seemed clear that there would never be reform. I’m not sure how much appetite there ever was for Brexit outside a committed minority and it felt as if many voters were eager to have some reason to vote Remain.

One of the narratives emerging now is that stupid old white people did it. They are selfish and have sold their children and grandchildren down the river because of their antediluvian prejudices. Presumably they voted carelessly while whistling and chewing hay, or with crimson faces screwed up with rage and false stories about immigrants sitting under their sparse white hair.

My parents and their circle of largely retired friends considered their votes with immense earnestness. Many of them are on fixed incomes that are dependent on investments and the stock market. Financial instability would affect their prosperity directly at a time in their lives where it’s hard to shrug and postpone your hopes to another year. Most of them are comfortable enough to have something to lose, but not affluent enough to be reckless. None of them are ideological, a good number of them are well-traveled; none has expressed bigotry in word or deed to anyone’s knowledge. Self-interest dictated that they would vote to stay in the EU, but around half didn’t. The most common reason given for this was that they felt the EU would fail sooner or later, or develop into something that wasn’t benign, and that rather than deferring the moment of reckoning, it was their duty to their children and grandchildren to take care of it now.

This line of reasoning may or may not turn out to be quixotic and calamitously mistaken, but it is reasoned, idealistic, courageous and even moving. This wasn’t xenophobic, selfish or moronic. If there is a difference between these older Leave voters and some of the more zealous young Remain voters, it is not nice vs nasty, but rather myopic empathy vs hypermetropic empathy, i.e. those whose empathy focuses on those nearest to them, and those whose empathy extends further but has something of a blurring or blind spot close up.

Meanwhile, the two people from my professional/social circle to be brave enough to admit to having voted Leave were dispassionate, matter of fact. Neither fit the stereotypical demographic or ideological profile, both being youngish college-educated women, well-traveled, culturally open (one to an unusual degree) and politically liberal. Neither is interested in immigration as a political issue, with one not mentioning it at all and the other merely saying that it might be a legitimate concern for others who are affected by it; she isn’t.

In different ways they were both concerned about the EU as a living entity and not as an idea and an expression of identity, personal or otherwise; they talked about how it worked, what it did, what was likely to happen with it in the future. It’s a thing, a good one or a bad one. Both said they preferred small organizations to large ones and one said that she thinks the EU won’t last, and it’s better to leave by choice in a planned way before it goes to hell.

Are they typical? I wouldn’t think so. But there’s likely to’ve been a lot of individual Leave votes in that ~52% that didn’t follow the general patterns.

You won’t struggle to find evidence of bigotry of the “we won, you leave now” sort. It made a nice chant for some England football fans in France, but then they were probably the same few who still chant “No surrender to the IRA” and are mostly after getting a rise and being indiscriminately offensive. The very small numbers of absurd ultra-nationalists have been exulting. But if these people think that they did win, and that the UK voted for their vision of things, they’ll have some sad disappointment ahead of them. People voted for all sorts of reasons and the likes of them have never been supported by a significant number of British voters and that hasn’t changed now. If Brexit were incarnated, it would not be as Trump. The bulk of British Leave voters would never under any circumstances vote for him and not many would even vote for one of our own weak-tea Trumps, such as Nigel Farage, the once and probably future leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip), who has never managed to get himself elected to the UK parliament. We may or may not have made an unwise decision, but we should be careful about assuming too much about what it means and why it happened—and what it means for the US vis–à–vis Donald J Trump.