What does the Brexit vote mean?

Mouvement Communiste
Kolektivně proti kapitálu
October/November 2016
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The idea of hold­ing a ref­er­en­dum on Bri­tain’s mem­ber­ship of the EU began as a prom­ise by then Prime Min­is­ter Camer­on to the “Euro­skep­tic” right wing of the Tory Party in Janu­ary 2013.¹ The Tor­ies won the gen­er­al elec­tion in May 2015 with an over­all par­lia­ment­ary ma­jor­ity so they had to go through with it. On 23 June 2016, a ma­jor­ity of UK cit­izens who turned out to vote (cer­tainly not a ma­jor­ity of re­gistered voters, much less a ma­jor­ity of the adult pop­u­la­tion), 52%, voted in fa­vor of leav­ing the European Uni­on.

The most im­port­ant thing to un­der­stand is that nobody ex­pec­ted the Leave vote to win, least of all the “Brex­it­eers” them­selves! Bri­tain’s ma­jor polit­ic­al parties were not pre­pared for it, and neither were most big com­pan­ies (des­pite the mod­ern fo­cus on “busi­ness con­tinu­ity” and “dis­aster re­cov­ery”). The con­sequences of this are that the Tory Party, the La­bour Party and even UKIP (the party whose whole rais­on d’être was Brexit) were thrown in­to crisis and the eco­nomy is sink­ing as un­cer­tainty delays in­vest­ment and com­plic­ates terms of trade.

The Leave vote can cer­tainly be seen as a kind of “protest vote” — this was clearly demon­strated by the fact that the “Leav­ers” didn’t ex­pect to win and had no idea what to do when they did! It can be seen as part of the rise of “right-wing ni­hil­ism.” In the 1970s it was punks, hip­pies, and an­arch­ists who said “fuck the sys­tem” without caring too much about what to re­place it with — now it’s dis­af­fected na­tion­al­ists and so­cial con­ser­vat­ives. An­ti­g­lob­al­iz­a­tion is the mod­ern “so­cial­ism of fools” (as lead­ing Ger­man So­cial Demo­crat, Au­gust Bebel said of an­ti­semit­ism).² It’s an ideo­logy which really grew to prom­in­ence among the lib­er­al left in the 1990s, but now it’s in­creas­ingly the right — Trump, Putin, UKIP, Front Na­tionale, etc. — who are its stand­ard-bear­ers.

On a glob­al level, vic­tory for the Leave cam­paign is part of a wider tend­ency to­wards eco­nom­ic pro­tec­tion­ism and isol­a­tion­ism (ac­com­pan­ied by big­ger or smal­ler doses of ra­cism and xeno­pho­bia) fa­cil­it­ated by a rise of polit­ic­al “pop­u­lists”³ — “pop­u­list” in the sense of just spout­ing a col­lec­tion of crowd-pleas­ing slo­gans with no con­crete pro­gram ad­dress­ing either the ma­ter­i­al con­cerns of their fol­low­ers or the prob­lems faced by cap­it­al ac­cu­mu­la­tion.

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