I believe there are three main reasons why many Britons voted to leave.
1. British politicians decided to go into the 'EU thing' decades ago without polling the British public, and the British public have felt growing disenfranchisment about it ever since. That is an issue which has little to do with the EU per se (the issue could have been almost anything else--such as a massively expensive UK space programme to land a man on Saturn's moon, Titan, or to nationalize the universities or privatize the NHS); it is much more to do with the British political system (the so-called nanny state). Remember Maggie Thatcher's downfall? The poll tax. She thought she could just ram a new tax down the taxpayers' throats, and it cost her the prime ministership.
2. There is a clear demographic divide in Britain: London, NI, and Scotland voted to stay, non-London England voted to go. That is a specifically British issue, nothing to do with the EU per se. This shows a clear dissatisfaction in the English country-side with London-centric politics. Woe to a political system which is so out of touch with its constituents.
3. There is a wide-spread feeling in Britain that Britain is being controlled from abroad (often hypostatized as 'Brussels' ). I submit, however, that Britons have already long since accepted a level of government control and intrusion by their own government which the rest of Europe would find scary and intolerable. There are more surveillance cameras in Britain than anywhere else in the world, and the intelligence services in Britain are actively monitoring all telecommunications. Britain already has all the infrastructure in place to implement a police state, and there is no written constitution limiting the power of Parliament to take the last few steps (which, no doubt, will seem expedient when the time comes). This control-freak issue too is really a specifically British issue, mistakenly projected onto 'Brussels'. Britain thinks it will recover its lost sovereignty by exiting the EU. It won't; it didn't have any sovereignty left to recover anyway. Yeah, ok, it'll be able to refuse Syrian refugees at its border. So what. Britain will still have to abide by international laws and treaties regulating exports and imports, aviation and maritime procedures, it ratified the terms of the ICC and is bound to abide by them, and all the rest of it. Thing is, it will now have to negotiate or re-validate many of those items piecemeal, whereas as an EU member it could have continued to negotiate treaties and agreements en bloc.
It is going to be a stoney road Britain (or rather, non-London England) has chosen to go down, and I expect the Scots will be the first to jump ship and hold a new referendum on Scottish independence.
Brexit reflections so far
27 Jun '16 18:25
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