My first response to the exit of Britain from the EU is to repost this excellent FT missive by Nicholas Barrett, a text that has been quite extensively reposted elsewhere in the wake of the vote. It reads:


"A quick note on the first three tragedies of the British vote to leave the EU. I wrote this on Facebook in the small hours in the wake of the result and it went slightly viral so I thought I would share it here.

Firstly, it was the working classes who voted for us to leave because they were economically disregarded and it is they who will suffer the most in the short term from the dearth of jobs and investment. They have merely swapped one distant and unreachable elite for another one.

Secondly, the younger generation has lost the right to live and work in 27 other countries. We will never know the full extent of the lost opportunities, friendships, marriages and experiences we will be denied. Freedom of movement was taken away by our parents, uncles, and grandparents in a parting blow to a generation that was already drowning in the debts of our predecessors.

Thirdly and perhaps most significantly, we now live in a post-factual democracy. When the facts met the myths they were as useless as bullets bouncing off the bodies of aliens in a HG Wells novel. When Michael Gove said ‘the British people are sick of experts’ he was right. But can anybody tell me the last time a prevailing culture of anti-intellectualism has lead to anything other than bigotry.

Oh, and one other thing. It looks as if the UK will now lose Northern Ireland and Scotland, both of which voted overwhelmingly to stay in the EU. When the Financial Times endorsed the Conservative party in the 2015 election the headline was “The compelling case for continuity in Britain”.

If you’re interested in my thoughts on what this means for the world in general, you can read my recent essay on the growing popularity of destructive ideas."


My second is to note my own serious alarm at what seems like a huge gamble by UK voters, one in which many were apparently unaware of the power that their vote wielded. This was not a parliamentary election in which ones vote may or may not carry any practical weight, but a 50/50 in/out plebicite with far-reaching consequences.

Daily now I am reading interviews with folks who voted to exit the EU but who were not in full possession of the facts, had failed to avail themselves of the facts or who couldn't really care about the facts. One female voter said that she had no interest in politics but had voted out because that was what her similarly disinterested friends were doing. So why vote at all, I might have replied, in a vote in which politics was a fundamental aspect of the circumstances of the referendum?

There was a case for leaving the EU, but it was a narrow and fraught one (such as the trade off between full sovereignty and the economic benefit) and this should have been litigated by all concerned.

Soon enough, Scotland will hold a new referendum and I suspect will leave the United Kingdom. Such are the unintended consequences of the rising English nativism.