The Seven Mistakes That Led to the (Shameless Stupidity of) Brexit

If you’re not quite following the bizarre, incredible, self-self-inflicted catastrophe that’s Brexit…well, I wouldn’t blame you. It’s not only labyrinthine…it’s a maze of shameless stupidity, head-spinning folly, and despair-inducing backwardness so deep that they literally seem impossible.

Let me tell you the story, in seven mistakes, that will probably go down in history as among the most hilariously, weirdly, astonishingly tragic set of choices a rich country ever made, (right up there with America cheerily electing a wannabe cartoon Fuhrer, of course.)

The first, formative, fundamental mistake — the one which set the wheels of tragedy in motion — that led to Brexit happened in the halcyon days of 2007. The global financial crisis exploded, the result of decades of financial “liberalization”, which basically means banks and hedge funds were granted open season to do their worst. That meant investing in shady project, giving loans to oligarchs, and pumping and dumping stocks. As most of these foolish “investments” were revealed to be little more than a shell game, bank after bank was threatened with sudden, catastrophic illiquidty, and then insolvency (translation, running short of money, and then going broke with nothing left to sell.)

The mistake that the British made was similar to the one that America did. It took all these private loans, and effectively put them on its own balance sheet — the public ledger. But almost no banker was prosecuted for fraud or malfeasance or simple misconduct. Almost no bank was reformed, management shaken up, and so on. In other words, the old formula of capitalism was applied yet again: privatize the gains, socialize the losses. The finance sector was bailed out, at the cost of…well, we don’t really know. Nobody’s counted it up yet. The best estimates put it at trillions.

Now, economics doesn’t have much that’s useful to teach us. But there is one lesson which stands out. After financial crises, countries swing to the right — the greater, the harder. Why? The reason probably goes something like this: thanks to neoliberalism, what happens after financial crises is that banks get bailed out — but middle classes don’t. And middle classes are the bulwark of any liberal democracy. When they turn illiberal — vengeful, full of sudden hatred and rage — the future is toast. That’s exactly what happened in America — and it’s what happened in Britain, too.

In Britain, this mistake, my second, was called “austerity.” The logic went like this. We bailed out the banks — so we’re broke! Time to tighten our belts, everyone. The government — which by this time was hardcore conservative, having been elected largely thanks to disgust over the way liberals had handled the financial crisis, therefore did exactly what it should have done. It cut investment in society savagely.

Just how savagely? Consider that by now, schools in England are so short of money, they’re closing one day a week. The NHS is so underfunded that life expectancy is falling. Britain’s foolish turn to austerity was probably one of the most severe in modern history. For sensible people, it raised the question: what kind of society doesn’t fund its school? What kind of country wants dumber kids? Closes its hospitals and clinics? What the? Does that make any sense?

Of course not. But by this point, there were few, if any, sensible people left. Even the left, who by this point had chosen Jeremy Corbyn — a 1970s style socialist — agreed, bizarrely, with the idea that “society was broke.” But a democracy that controls its own currency can never go broke, it can just make more money, which is a social fiction — and all this time, the interest rate on British debt was negative, which means that far from being broke, the world was throwing free money at Britain, with which to fund those schools and hospitals. Imagine being desperate for cash with which to educate your kids and pay for their healthcare — and I come along and offer you a negative rate loan: no interest, and shrinking principal every year. Wouldn’t you be crazy not to take it? But Britain was the one who was too arrogant, or too foolish, or both, to get this — because it had fallen prey to this crazy, absurd idea that it was “broke.”

As austerity raced through society like a tsunami, British life simply fell apart. All those closing hospitals and schools and so on cost jobs, which shrunk the economy, and so on. Result? I’ve detailed a few of the statistics already — falling life expectancy, and so forth. There are many more. Incomes never rose to pre-crisis levels. Brits couldn’t save, since they weren’t earning more. Depression and suicide rose. Violent crime rose to epidemic levels. Rage and anger skyrocketed, as towns that once thrived were left to decay — just like America’s Rust Belt.

Who to blame for all these problems? That brings me to my third mistake. My previous two were ones of leadership. But this one lay at the hands of the people. People don’t like to admit their mistakes — and Brits couldn’t bring themselves to admit that they’d chosen the wrong leaders, one who cut investment in those very people, instead of investing in them. Instead, they fell prey to a band of weird, trashy demagogues — who blamed all the problems above, dying towns, flat incomes, lives going nowhere, a grim struggle to make ends meet, on…

The EU. Enter Nigel Garage and the gang. Rarely has history seen someone so vulgar and ignorant and foolish held up by a society as a paragon of moderation and wisdom. But here Brits were — people who prided themselves on their taste and their history, seeking cheap comfort in the arms of a man who’d be more at home on a used car lot than in the halls of government. Never mind — Britain fell hook, line, and sinker for the bizarre, absurd, trivally false line that the EU was responsible for all its problems, whether a lack of decent jobs, nobody ever getting a raise, precarity, inequality, isolation, or a lack of investment, income, and capital for ordinary people.

The truth was the precise opposite. The EU was the one investing in decrepit, newly impoverished British towns. It was the one whose companies built cars and computers and gave researchers at universities and labs grants. It was the one whose high standards — like for food — kept British farms earning profits, in a merciless global food trade. But nobody seemed to understand any of this — or even crucially, care to try to. Instead, they were busy worshipping at the temple of stupidity the Nigel Farages of the world had built.

What do I mean by that? Well, not so long ago, Britain had the best news media in the world. But by now, about 2016 or so, extremists and demagogues seemed to rule the airwaves. You’d hear self-proclaimed experts, who were extremists in the thinnest of disguise, with made-up titles, at fake “think tanks”, blaming the EU for all Britain’s problems — but you’d never once hear the voice of a respectable economic, thinker, or intellectual. Never — ever. The entire public sphere had been given over to extremists — with nary a question, a doubt, a moments’ hesitation. (Even the august BBC somehow seemed to lose its mind, its historic standards, packing its marquee shows, like Question Time, with bellowing, thuggish activists for extremist nationalism, openly not-so-disguised as “analysts” and “economists” and “commentators.”)

Here’s one example — leaving the EU, the extremists and nationalists said, would save 350 million pounds a week (or a month), that would fund the NHS. Nobody — not a single voice in British media pointed out the obvious: if Britain wanted to fund the NHS, all it had to do was take the free money the world was throwing at it. The EU wasn’t costing Britain the NHS — how could it be? It didn’t say: “don’t pay for your healthcare system!” That was Britain’s choice. It was the British people’s choice. It was British politicians’ choice. Nobody but the British made the foolish choices that had led their lives to collapse — perhaps, then, it’s no wonder that it was so easy for the Nigel Farages of the world to blame the EU.

That’s my fourth mistake. Society had by now gone extremist. It was in the grip of a kind of fever. A fever of nationalism, which was racing through its body, setting its mind on fire. Nobody appeared capable of thinking at all by this point. Nobody questioned the propaganda and the lies — not leaders, not politicians, not intellectuals, not journalists. Instead, they legitimized, spread, and normalized them, by “debating” them as if they were true, instead of pointing out why they were obviously false. An entire nation was being fed a diet of lies before the most crucial decision in its modern history — “The EU costs us billions! Get rid of the EU and you’ll save your town, your job! They’re our enemies, not our friends! They’re the reason we’re growing poor and powerless!!” All…lies.

Nobody questioned why the entire public sphere had been over to extremists, to nationalists, whose mouths were crammed with lies, their grins twisted with glee, to people who in saner times would have been instantly discounted as fools and charlatans. By now, charlatans were great leaders to look up to. Such is what nationalism does to societies — the most bellicose, self-assured, and violent ones, who are always the most foolish, simple, and wrong ones, too, win the day, because they shout the loudest and angriest.

Let me spell out what I mean by this mistake. There should have been journalists and intellectuals who questioned both the motives, wisdom, and intelligence of the rising demagogues. There weren’t. There should have been some kind of remembrance from society, from people at large, about what nationalism did to Europe not so long ago. There wasn’t. There should have been some kind of rejection of extremism from politicians. Unfortunately…

There wasn’t — there was the precise opposite: a PM who gave in. That’s my sixth mistake. The PM shortly before this time caved to the extremists. He called a referendum on leaving the EU. David Cameron’s legacy is forever reduced to a terrible joke for that single, simple reason. Why would a sensible PM give extremists and nationalists…exactly what they wanted?

Yet Cameron did. And his party appeared totally unconcerned. Nobody much thought: “wait — does the average person have any idea that the EU is helping to fund their job at that car factory or the university or the farm? Do they even know how the EU works? Do they even know what it really is?”

You see, a sane society wouldn’t have called this referendum until it was sure that people had been educated in legitimate and serious ways about the choices before them — that they really understood, for example, even how much the EU “cost”, or who it’s member states were. Instead, Brits were confronted by a barrage of propaganda. Propaganda that was as absurd as it was insane: things that were lies so obvious that any sensible person should have laughed, after screaming.

And in that context, calling a referendum was possibly the most foolish thing a leader could do. The fever of nationalism that gripped the land, as people exploded with rage at their lives cratering, fed with lies, that incited it and fueled it, was only going to lead to one place: turning on friends, allies, and neighbors, who had only ever really stood by them. Just like it had every time in history. A wiser mind than David Cameron’s might have understood this. A mind like…wait, what about the opposition?

Erm…what opposition? After the referendum was won, thanks to the propaganda and lies of the nationalists, to leave the EU — the last mistake of all happened, and it was probably the most catastrophic one. The “opposition”, which is to say the left…supported leaving, too. I know, you’re laughing. But it’s true. So there was no opposition to speak of. There was unity…over far right nationalist extremism. What the? The opposition wasn’t opposing. And it’s almost impossible to overstate just how ruinously, astoundingly stupid this was.

You see, Jeremy Corbyn, who was by now the leader of Labour — which is a party of social democracy — was an olde time socialist. The kind of guy that probably keeps 1970s Leninist posters in his den (fine by me.) Corbyn is as red as a college socialist. And yet.

The fact is that the EU is the single greatest social democratic project in human history. If I’d asked anyone in Europe a century ago, “do you think that Europe will be united under a single Parliament to which European countries send representatives, which invests in public goods across a shared Europe, which has no borders?”, you probably would have looked at me like I was crazy. Europe’s long history was marred by perpetual violence. France against Spain against Germany against…over and over and over again.

And then came the EU. It’s explicit goal was that peace would come from prosperity, and prosperity would come from good lives for all, and good lives for all would come from each country investing in its neighbours. In other words, Europe was going to end the problem of war, by people investing in one another, lifting one another up. With what? With healthcare systems, schools, universities, retirement systems — public goods that the world could scarcely imagine then, and much of it, like America, can scarcely comprehend now.

How successful was this theory — which was explicitly socially democratic, social democracy deep down at its roots, right in its essence — giving people precisely the kinds of lives, freer of exploitation than anywhere else in the world, that Marx and Engels once argued for? This theory was so successful that in just half a century, Europe rose from devastated rubble — to have the world’s highest living standards…ever. By 2010, nobody in human history had lived longer, happier, or richer lives than Western Europeans.

In other words, Europe proved the hypothesis that social democracy is the most sophisticated political economy we know of — and it proved at light-speed, with explosive success. It proved the idea that with prosperity comes the end of violence, and prosperity is only had by people investing in one another.

In other words, my friends, socialism won. Europe isn’t Leninist socialism, to be sure. But it would be a foolish mistake not to see Europe’s stunning success as an example of socialism done right. Not with one-party autocracy — but multi-party democracy. Not with coercive communism — but with consensual decision-making (over capital, over investment, over resources.) Europe is history’s greatest social democratic project — and social democracy is a kind of a socialism.

Only not an extremist one. Not one that says: we should nationalize all the companies! Ban all the dry-cleaners!! Make the people lived in shared housing and wear one track suit! Test everyone’s ideological conformity! It’s not Soviet: extremist, absolutist, one-dimensional (which, incidentally, is why Americans don’t understand it: they’ve gone Soviet, but for capitalism.)

Maybe that’s why all that wasn’t good enough for Jeremy Corbyn, Lenin’s last disciple. So Corbyn’s Labour Party, incredibly, backed Brexit…even though the EU was history’s grandest, most radical, most transformative experiment in social democracy, the stunning proof of it’s explosive success vis a vis capitalism…Corbyn’s Labour Party rejected the EU, history’s greatest social democracy…because it wasn’t socialist enough. That’s my seventh, awesome, final, mistake.

Do you see what I mean by shameless stupidity? Do you see the irony, and how staggering and bizarre it is? That history’s greatest social democracy wasn’t socialist enough…for the opposition to oppose…what far-right extremists…had been allowed to propose, and then carry out….on the basis of bizarre, absurd lies and propaganda…en masse, even on the BBC…by a supine establishment…in a fervid atmosphere of delusional rage…as people’s lives fell apart…because the banks got bailed out but they didn’t…after the biggest crisis since the Great Depression?

All of that, my friends, is so twisted, that my mind can barely comprehend it. There are so many alleys in this labyrinth of shameless stupidity that the mind reels. There are so many layers in this moldy cake of astounding folly that the mind staggers. There is so much idiocy so brazen at work in Brexit that it is probably one of the most amazingly self-destructive things a country has ever done( and if you doubt me, reread the paragraph above.)

So there Britain is. It’s PM now begging the EU…not to Brexit…after it spent three years doing nothing but “debating” how to Brexit…while the EU shakes its head in disbelief…at the impossible, shameless stupidity.

What’s the lesson to learn in all this, my friends? Oddly, or maybe reassuringly, I think it’s pretty simple. Stupidity is like a virus. Especially when it’s shameless. When it’s fed with rage, anger, and despair. Let it take root — and bang! Before you know it, it’s spiraled out of control, reached epidemic proportions, overwhelmed a society, left it mindless and thoughtless, unable to cope or contend with reality at all anymore. To the point that even the most powerful and wealthy countries can find themselves laughingstocks and dunces — wham! — overnight. Yesterday’s bailouts and austerity packages all too easily become today’s Nigel Farages become tomorrow’s Brexits…which become history’s great humiliations, embarassments, and mistakes.

When you see shameless stupidity, before you, my friends: do your country (and the world) a favour. Do what Brits didn’t do. Call it what it is, and tell everyone you know that you reject it as stupidity, laughing — and remind them where stupidity leads: to self-destruction. Or history will be the one who laughs, all too soon.

March 2019