Brexit is going to dominate political headlines for a long time. The Guardian is full of essential reading this morning.
Brexit won’t shield Britain from the horror of a disintegrating EU
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The repercussions of the vote will be dire, albeit not the ones Cameron and Brussels had warned of. The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement. Schäuble and Brussels will huff and puff but they will, inevitably, seek such a settlement with London. The Tories will hang together, as they always do, guided by their powerful instinct of class interest. However, despite the relative tranquillity that will follow on from the current shock, insidious forces will be activated under the surface with a terrible capacity for inflicting damage on Europe and on Britain….
A pyrrhic victory? Boris Johnson wakes up to the costs of Brexit
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He has everything he ever wanted. It’s just that somehow, as he fought his way through booing crowds on his Islington doorstep before holding an uncharacteristically subdued press conference on Friday morning, it didn’t really look that way. One group of Tory remainers watching the speech on TV jeered out loud when a rather pale Johnson said leaving Europe needn’t mean pulling up the drawbridge; that this epic victory for Nigel Farage could somehow “take the wind out of the sails” of anyone playing politics with immigration. Too late for all that now, one said. …
After this vote the UK is diminished, our politics poisoned
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The chutzpah with which the Tory right – the very people who had pioneered austerity, damaging jobs, services and communities – blamed migrants for the lack of resources was breathtaking. The mendacity with which a section of the press fanned those flames was nauseating. The pusillanimity of the remain campaign’s failure to counter these claims was indefensible.
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We are leaving the EU and entering a dark and uncertain period. Offered a choice between fear of the unknown or fear of the foreigner, fear inevitably won. Britain lost.
‘If you’ve got money, you vote in … if you haven’t got money, you vote out’
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Most of all, Brexit is the consequence of the economic bargain struck in the early 1980s, whereby we waved goodbye to the security and certainties of the postwar settlement, and were given instead an economic model that has just about served the most populous parts of the country, while leaving too much of the rest to anxiously decline. Look at the map of those results, and that huge island of “in” voting in London and the south-east; or those jaw-dropping vote-shares for remain in the centre of the capital: 69% in Tory Kensington and Chelsea; 75% in Camden; 78% in Hackney, contrasted with comparable shares for leave in such places as Great Yarmouth (71%), Castle Point in Essex (73%), and Redcar and Cleveland (66%). Here is a country so imbalanced it has effectively fallen over.
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What defines these furies is often clear enough: a terrible shortage of homes, an impossibly precarious job market, a too-often overlooked sense that men (and men are particularly relevant here) who would once have been certain in their identity as miners, or steelworkers, now feel demeaned and ignored. The attempts of mainstream politics to still the anger have probably only made it worse: oily tributes to “hardworking families”, or the the fingers-down-a-blackboard trope of “social mobility”, with its suggestion that the only thing Westminster can offer working-class people is a specious chance of not being working class anymore.
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Think about that woman in Collyhurst: “If you’ve got no money, you vote out.” Therein lies not just the against-the-odds triumph of the leavers, but evidence of huge failures that the stunned mainstream of politics has only just begun to acknowledge, let alone do anything about.
All of those are well worth reading, but the last piece is particularly relevant. Brexit wasn’t a vote on left-right lines, it was a vote on rich-poor lines. Neoliberal economics – increasing inequality – fuels anger, with unpredictable consequences.
Meanwhile in America, an important announcement yesterday…
US election: Sanders says he will vote for Clinton
US Senator Bernie Sanders has said he will vote for his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in November’s presidential election.
The two have fought for the Democratic nomination, which former Secretary of State Mrs Clinton won this month. Mr Sanders, a self-described socialist, told MSNBC he would do everything in his power to defeat the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump. But he stopped short of saying he would end his campaign. He said his job now was to “fight for the strongest possible platform” at the party’s convention in July, including a higher minimum wage. …
The only way Trump could have won was if Sanders had stood as an independent, and that isn’t going to happen. Also, the Trump campaign is falling apart.
Campaign Finance Documents Show Donald Trump’s Campaign Is in Disarray
Maybe Corey Lewandowski got out at the right time. While reporters scrambled on Monday to figure out why Trump let his campaign manager go, the campaign was preparing to release its latest campaign finance filing that looks, at least at first glance, to be devastating. It doesn’t look much better on second glance.
The first glance: Hillary Clinton’s campaign has more than 35 times the cash Trump’s does.
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It’s not just the low numbers that portend potential disaster for the GOP’s man. It’s the way he arrives at the low numbers that looks scary. There’s no real significant support from top donors—the bedrock of a strong monthly fundraising report. But the Trump campaign picked up just 133 donations that hit the maximum allowed amount of $2,700. Clinton had more donations of $2,700 on just May 17 (140) than Trump had all month, and almost 15 times as many for the entire month (1,981). …
Dump Trump? Paul Ryan leaves door open to Republican convention revolt
Pressure for one last attempt to dump Donald Trump built among Republicans on Sunday, as the party’s leader appeared to encourage a possible revolt that could still see an alternative nominee chosen at next month’s national convention.
After a week in which the presumptive nominee appalled many colleagues with his reaction to a shooting massacre in Orlando, House speaker Paul Ryan made clear he would not try to obstruct any rebellion against Trump by delegates in Cleveland.
“They write the rules, they make the decisions,” he told NBC’s Meet the Press. “All I want to make sure is to make sure it is done above board, clearly, honestly and by the rules.” …
The Trump Train is derailing. But the disenfranchised anger that was fueling it won’t go away, it will find another outlet. Social inequality drives political madness – we have to fix it.
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