Leave according to remain

The EU according to leavers

In the complexity of Brexit we can see the dynamics of the widespread ongoing disaster affecting the operation of Democracy throughout the world. This is my tentative analysis:

1. The difficulty of governments to communicate with people. Formation and election of political classes are no longer suitable to represent the social reality that expresses them. Election laws and regulations are obsolete, motivations and political options are manipulated by the media. People think they have a choice, but in fact they behave according to subliminal conditions and do what the system wants them to do. Eventually elected representatives have very little to do with the people they are supposed to represent and more to do with the system that got them elected.
2. Interference of ethnical nationalisms with common feelings. The social identity, which was once felt and shared by the whole nation, has been broken into local subcultures, related to ethnicities, class, economic standards, corporate interests. Each subculture has specific interests, often conflicting, diverse and hostile.
3. Economic inequality. During the last twenty years of capitalism, post communism and neo-liberism in Europe, the lack of a financial re-balancing mechanism between the center and periphery of market economies, resulted in a consistent increment of economic inequality: the rich became richer and the poor became poorer. The 2008 Great Financial Crisis iaccelerated the process. Inequality poisons social relations and radicalizes political options. Room for compromise is limited.
4. The present cultural/political crisis of the European Union, politically and practically unable to implement the urgently needed reforms to convert the Union into a Federation has fed the party of the eurosceptics: Brexit was born in England but originated in Brussels. The EU bears strong responsibilities for the British ongoing tragedy and neither acknowledges nor seems capable of facing them.
   
5. “Remain” has not been able to clearly explain its motivations. Britons have not understood why they should stick to a multinational entity, conceptually and functionally in critical conditions, after centuries of imperial and insular success history and there was no clear, understandable, answer to that question. Brussels has not been useful, which is to say they have not shown serious cooperation, or have not been able to help at all.
6. Neither “Brexiteers” had solid arguments, just a vague feeling of Britishness, Good Old Blighty kind of stuff, at times historically noble, but  generally borderline to parochial, gutsy nationalism, plus a keen anti-Brussels hostility.
7. The paramount importance of the trade advantageof the 500 million consumers market is clear to entrepreneurs, industrial operators and global finance people, but alien to the masses only excited by the present contingency as if there were no future. For the “Leavers”consequences do not count, in fact do not even exist. When facts do not count, words are useless.
8. Parliament feuds. The difficulties of the EU negotiations exposed Theresa May to the aggression of her Tory peers, who were trying to substitute her, and to the aggression of the opposition who saw the chance to return to power. Neither had better proposals than hers, as was crudely shown by the vote on March 29^thwhen Parliament was not able to approve any of the eight proposals tabled. Theresa failed, but Parliament was even worse.
9. Last but not least: the unforgivable mistake to call a referendum on such a complex issue. The brutal simplification of the Remain/Leave choice placed the sophisticated issue, geo-political, financial, and cultural, to the uninformed choice of the people’s vote. Experience has proved time and again that referendum procedures are a catastrophe for complex issues, a shameful betrayal of political responsibility by the government, a lethal blow to democracy.
10. The end: Possibly one of thegreatest failures of “politics” as an institution and as a culture and a disturbing victory of irrationality over reason.

On Saturday 30^ththe British Parliament voted against the last Brexit proposal by Theresa May. The NO DEAL solution is now reality, and nobody knows what further disaster it will bring about.
(lorenzo matteoli)