Certainly, a reasonable person can understand the reasons why someone might throw a brick through their own television set. We might even concede that they were legitimately provoked. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a profoundly stupid and unproductive and self-injurious thing to do. And that’s what the English people just did.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Gee, I guess it must be time for Thomas Frank to write a book called What’s the Matter With England?/
No Bastille Day! for you, eh?
Leaving the snark behind, the vote to pull out of the EU just makes me sad. I lived for a time in England and have a great fondness for many aspects of the culture. I also know that the English share with the American people some isolationist tendencies, the common inability to speak a second language being the most obvious one. The vote to leave the EU probably had a lot to do with that mindset.
We all know about Germany rolling out the welcome mat for refugees, but still it was always England that was the destination most desired by refugees. Something was drawing them there.
I don’t feel like throwing a rock through my TV screen, and I sure won’t pontificate about the meaning of the Brexit vote. I just feel sad that a country that welcomed me is once again succumbing to the pull of splendid isolation.
I’m less surprised or upset by the individuals in the UK who expressed immediate “But I didn’t think Leave would actually win!” remorse. People are people.
But when government bodies openly delude themselves and try to deny the consequences of their actions?
http://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/update/2016-06-24/cornwall-pleas-for-reassurance-it-will-not-be-
worse-off-following-brexit-vote/
“Cornwall has issued an urgent plea for reassurance that it will not be worse off following the Brexit vote.
The county has received a “significant amounts” of funding from the EU for the past 15 years due to its “relatively weak economy”.
But, after 56.5% of voters in the county chose to leave the Union, the council says it is now seeking urgent reassurance that money allocated to it will still be received.
Prior to the vote the Council said they were told by the Leave campaign that funding would still be available.
“
That’s premeditated delusion from elected officials who should know better, premeditated delusion which caused them to mislead their own citizens.
Before long, me thinks there will be a whole lot more buyers remorse.
Same thing happened in Wales.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jun/25/view-wales-town-showered-eu-cash-votes-leave-ebbw-va
le
It’s starting to look like the Brexit vote was decided by a bunch of protest votes of people – and their leaders! – who didn’t think Leave could ever win. Certainly the winning leaders of the vote are as much in shock as the losers. Boris Johnson looks like the dog who caught the car. Or like Redford at the end of The Candidate.
The warning for the US voters from this election is don’t waste your vote on a protest – if Nader 2000 wasn’t enough to underscore the possibility of disaster as a result, Brexit 2016 will be.
The amazing part of all of this is how so many of the voters seem to be surprised by the financial down fall. It would appear that most average people just do not understand world finances. They are so busy dealing with their home finances and vote via emotions not reason.
They really are busy, coping with the new world where you have to run so hard to stay in one place and getting a little ahead is nearly impossible. It’s not surprising that they aren’t thinking about the global economy. Sadly it isn’t surprising that there are politicians ready to appeal to their ignorance and fear of foreigners.
What’s continually shocking is the willingness of the mass media to go along with it, with more newspaper readers getting the Leave message:
It’s cute that Rupert Murdoch allowed the daily TImes to side with Remain, because that’s his respectable paper, while he put his other papers on the stupid side.
Considering that the EU is pretty much a money-making grift for the German and British bankers, perhaps you could rearrange the metaphor as Brits throwing the brick through the bankers’ window.
As an aside, I looked at my portfolio. No, I’m still getting under three hundred a month from social security. It hasn’t changed with Brexit. In fact, it hasn’t changed much since I began getting it. Apparently, the cost-of-living doesn’t go up for people on social security.
Another remarkable summary illustrating the irresponsibility of Great Britain leaders:
https:/www.balloon-juice.com/2016/06/24/through-the-looking-glass-hope-is-not-a-strategy
“What Johnson, Gove, Stuart, and their fellow Leave supporters also failed to consider was what would happen if the United Kingdom was not united in the referendum. On the BBC last night, Former Scottish First Minister and Scottish National Party MP Alex Salmond explained to the panel that this concern was brought up to Prime Minister Cameron before the referendum was set. And that the recommendation was that it should require not just a popular vote win for Leave, but a win for Leave in all four constituent portions of the United Kingdom to trigger the Brexit. Salmond explained, with a fair degree of amusement, that Cameron didn’t think that would be necessary, rejected the recommendation, and was probably now regretting doing so.
Regardless, and despite Johnson’s call for calm, unity, and no need to or worry that this might lead to the dissolution of the the United Kingdom, that reality has already begun. Scotland is preparing itself for a second independence referendum as they wish to stay in the EU. Republican officials in Northern Ireland have raised the possibility of a referendum to leave the UK and unite with the Republic of Ireland. And Gibraltar’s status is unclear, with Spanish officials calling for shared sovereignty….
Despite planning by the Bank of England in case things went wrong, the Vote Leave Campaign leadership, official and unofficial alike, did not seem to have a plan for the effect of victory on the British, European, and global economies. The pro Brexit vote demonstrates the failure of elected and appointed officials who do not have a firm grasp of policy, strategy, and their potential effects – positive and negative.
It is quite ironic that a successful referendum campaign partially based on anger at elites, notables, and experts to run things effectively has shown that the elites, notables, and experts running the Vote Leave movement and campaign do indeed not have the foggiest idea of how to run things effectively. Nothing says “I understand and empathize” like a Vote Leave Tory Member of Parliament, who graduated from public school and the Oxbridge system and has been an MP for his entire professional career, explaining to BBC anchors that the average British person is fed up with the failures of the elites and the experts running Britain and that is why the country must leave the EU.
The chaos seen today clearly demonstrates the failure of strategy and policy among the Vote Leave campaign leadership. We can clearly see that they don’t really have any ways and means to achieve their stated end: a negotiated departure from the EU that provides Britain with the best possible terms. Nor do they have any idea what they should be. They have destroyed their relationships with the EU leadership who want the separation done immediately and are in no mood to bargain, let alone allow Britain off the hook easy. And they have no leverage with the EU as a result. Johnson, Gove, Stuart, Farage, and others are now the dog that caught the Vauxhall. Unfortunately they clearly have no idea what to do with it.”
That is why they leave governing to the banksters and lobbyists!
Oh, I have major quarrels with the brutal austerity forced upon multiple supposedly sovereign nations in Europe, austerity much more severe than the cuts pursued in the U.S.
EU leadership is bad, chosen in flawed ways, and has pursued misguided policies. One would hope they would learn from this episode and alter their policies.
These agreements with you do not turn the series of decisions by Great Britain leaders which resulted in this week’s referendum into brilliant strategies which will improve the circumstances for Britishers with low and middle incomes.
David Cameron is the worst Prime Minister in the history of the Kingdom.
How much of this was the result of open borders?
Immigrants are the shiny objects that the Leave promoters could use to lead the working class to scapegoat people who seem to be taking their jobs and neighborhoods. A perception that certain political parties used to gain popular power during the Reagan-Thatcher era.
The Leave voters still haven’t be clued in that they were sold a mess of pottage 36 years ago and that all the promises of peace through “strength” and prosperity through
freedomderegulation were a fraud.Caught in the bind of “criticism is unpatriotic” and too angry and too proud to admit they were scammed by conservative politicians, nativism comes to their emotional rescue.
A referendum designed in London, by London elites of various stripes, for the benefit of London interests in Parliament, the referendum was supported by the UK’s equvalent of flyover country.
It is as if Trump succeeded in getting the GOP leaderhship to push through a referendum on allowing secession of the former Confederate states and enough background votes to let them leave occurred in the other states that the referendum won. And all parties concerned woke up the next morning wondering what to do practically. Minorities in the former Confederate states not otherwise encumbered would likely soon begin migration out of the area, removing labor power from many key institutions. Wall Street would no longer know how to value companies like Coca-Cola, Bank of America, Duke Energy, FedEx, ExxonMobil, AT&T, Halliburton, American Airlines, and Kimberly-Clark.
And of course, the secession campaign would comfort older voters with the notion that this will not affect your Social Security, Medicare, or veterans benefits. It will just get rid of Obamacare and all those pesky EPA regulations. And free up public lands from the BLM and other Department of Interior agencies. (Not a problem if the public does not know where BLM lands are.)
It’s also insane and dangerous for leaders in the United States to play with fire by encouraging the breakup of the EU. I hope it goes without saying how many ways this stuff is rock-headed.
The only thing I would say is we have to pay attention to what people think. Those leave votes remind me of people cheering in the streets for war. Something was very wrong there, maybe here too with all the Trump supporters. We have allowed endless wars and dysfunctional government for too long, while ignoring our economy. The consequences of that were clearly serious in Britain. Someone even threw a brick at his TV I hear.
Well, economic feudalists can claim that they’ve listened to someone before installing the retrograde, horrible policies they prefer.
What counts is who you’re listening to and, most importantly, what policies you place in response to them and how you administrate those policies. These things are not simple. Even interpreting these policies and their successes and failures are challenging.
First Tooting.
Then England.
Then the world.
And now a lot of people who’d voted for Brexit are saying “Hey, wait a minute, I didn’t really mean it! It was just a protest vote, I never thought it would actually happen!” There’s an online petition to Parliament to hold a second referendum and it’s already gotten over 2 million signatures.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/25/politics/uk-referendum-regrexit/index.html
It remains to be seen whether the #Regrexits will get their do-over, but at least they might have a chance — unlike, say, protest voters in U.S. Presidential elections.
This is hilarious. MULLIGAN, please I demand we have a mulligan!
They should just add an an option on the ballot:
“I vote to stay in the EU, under the condition that the Union changes all their policies to meet my personal preferences”
That’ll win for sure.
Well, it is a non-binding referendum. The Conservative “Leave” faction got their mandate.
It may be a non-binding resolution, but it appears to me the mandate the Leave side has is to leave the EU. In that way, it’s politically binding.
The Prime Minister quit, and said he was doing so in order to create the political space for new British leaders to leave the EU. I think that’s a pretty clear message.
If economic conditions deteriorated in England and Wales, negotiations didn’t go well with the EU to establish the terms of the exit, and Scotland and Ireland continued and executed plans for referendas to exit Great Britain, I can imagine these things creating pressure on Parliament to deny the will of the voters here, or try to hold a different election to create a different mandate. It’s not impossible.
It just seems unlikely, and would certainly be humiliating to the Leave faction. They would have earned their humiliation.
This is impossible. Freed from the dead hand of unrepresentative, elitist, neoliberal institutions in Brussels, and the finance-capitalist octopus in Frankfurt, a greener, more prosperous, less unequal, less prejudiced UK is inevitable.
You have far too little confidence in the british elite in how much they can screw up their nest.
They can do far far worse than they have done so far, give them time and more stupid ideas of how to game the system for their favor, then sit back and watch them astonish you how truly incompetent they truly are in anything that helps their society..
Your lack of faith in their total selfishness and incompetence is not going to help them achieve their wishes.
Remember they haven’t pissed off the welsh enough so they also want to bolt, but they probably will work on that one also.
The greedy rest of the 1% elite are working as hard as they can to screw up the rest of the planet for the other 99% have faith the british elite will do their best in jolly old england.
After all they have to top the crash of Sept 2008 and Brexit.