I kind of called that. in It's a llittle llazy over here

Voted Remain, but once the gap had closed to 50/50 with a week or so to go, I always thought that the polls would underestimate the final turnout for Brexit due to people who were voting Leave but not really wanting to be associated with the nastier parts of the Leave campaign.

The Remain side couldn’t have ballsed this up worse if they’d tried. They just couldn’t help themselves, I guess. Faced with fantasy claims from the Leave camp they decided to fight lies and exaggeration with their own lies and exaggeration, albeit not remotely on the same scale. Then they got absolutely suckered into fighting Nigel Farage and his merry band of twats, and completely lost sight of who they actually needed to persuade in order to win the vote.

Nobody and nothing was going to persuade the hard Brexiters to switch sides. The target should have been the undecided and the soft, more moderate potential Brexiters, but the Remain camp were so obsessed with fighting and denouncing the extreme side of the Leave campaign that the only two messages that ended up coming across from the Remain side were:

a) The world will literally end if we leave the EU, the seas will rise, rains of blood will fall, England will lose on penalties again, Nigel Farage will come and kick you in the nuts every single day and so on . . .

b) If you vote Leave, you’re a bigoted xenophobic racist who wants to have Nigel Farage’s babies.

Nobody believed a) because the scares got too exaggerated (and we’re now so used to politicians lying to us that nobody believes any of them about anything anymore), and b) just served to alienate and piss off the exact group of people that the Remain camp needed to get at. The message should have been consistent, calm, and aimed entirely at the moderates: “Yes we understand you have concerns, but leaving will not fix these things. You will not get what you want by leaving the EU. The world won’t end in or out, but we will will be worse off and this is why. The claims of Leave are wrong and this is why.” Those messages were there, but they got drowned out.

Having said that, I’ll play devil’s advocate for a minute. There is a large element of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ going on here. Undeniably, a large number of racist and xenophobic scumbags voted Leave for all the wrong reasons, with vile intentions towards anyone with the wrong colour skin or nationality. The natural temptation for any normal person is to align themselves immediately on the opposite side of the argument, because who the hell wants to be on the same side as the bigot down the street who tells hard-working, decent people to go back where they came from because they were born in another country?

Trouble is, that’s not logical. The fact that some vile people voted leave for terrible reasons doesn’t make the EU a good thing, or the right thing. The EU is a political project explicitly intended to create a federal Europe with a single market, currency, legal system and foreign policy. The thing is, economic union without proper political union is a recipe for trouble, and the political union isn’t there. Not enough people outside of the EU politicians pushing the EU project actually want it.

The problems in the Eurozone are a microcosm of that. A single currency and monetary policy across such a wide group of national economies is utter lunacy unless you have a truly united political structure around it to make it work, and to compensate for the inevitable problems caused by a single monetary policy that can’t work for all areas of the zone at once.

Within the UK, a single currency/market across four countries mostly works out because we have a single government that is directly accountable to all of the people in the UK via national elections. The government has to look after the entire country and can use its tax revenues to intervene where the overall policy isn’t suitable for one region or another at any given time.

Even then, many people in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the English regions would tell you that the government’s priorities are horribly skewed towards London and the south east because that’s where their core voters are. That’s in one small union with a single language and broadly identical culture all over the nation.

The EU, by comparison, is a half-way house. They’re trying to run a single market, currency and economic policy, but each of the different nations in that single market is still trying to look after itself first and foremost. It’s a group of nations trying to act as if they were one country without ever really having full unity of policy or direction.

There is no single European identity that supersedes national identities, not yet. It’s not like the US, where most people would consider themselves proud Americans first no matter what their state is (I stand to be corrected on that, US readers. . . ). German, French, Italian, or British politicians may want to support the EU project, but they are not going to throw their own countries under the bus for the good of other EU nations. They’re accountable to their own people, and that’s whose votes they’re chasing.

The European Union can only really work as intended if people are willing to be European first, and you have to face facts, most people aren’t. Free movement can only really work if you tear down the barriers to movement and consider Europe to be one place where people are happy to move around. It’s not, and they aren’t. Moving from the UK to Italy or Germany to Greece is not like moving from California to Arkansas. It’s one thing to have the same right to work in any EU country that a US citizen has to work in any US state, but it’s infinitely harder in practice when you have language and cultural barriers between EU nations that don’t exist between US states.

This has been coming, one way or another. We didn’t sign up for the Euro, we didn’t sign up for Schengen (no border controls), and sooner or later that was going to come to a head. Something had to give at some point; we were always going to have to either stop pussyfooting around, adopt the Euro and become part of the project, or we’d have to leave the project, or the project needed to fundamentally change. The latter has never looked like happening.

In the end we’re leaving, in the most idiotic way possible. What happens now? Unfortunately, nobody knows. It could go badly for us. The EU has every incentive to give us the worst deal possible to head off further dissent in the ranks. We’re losing automatic access to the common market. If we want to deal with the EU we’ll likely have to pay dearly (and accept freedom of movement unconditionally, which would, if nothing else, be hilariously ironic and a fitting reward for all those people who did vote leave because they wanted rid of all the foreigners).

On the other hand, we’re no longer tied to a political project that we were never fully committed to in the first place. We can maybe concentrate on being good friends and allies with Europe, instead of being the awkward partner who doesn’t really want to commit but is too scared to leave.

The main thing is that the moderates in this country on all sides of the political spectrum need to get their collective arse in gear right now and stamp down hard on the far-right extremists who want to turn this decision into a bigot’s manifesto. In or out of the EU, that isn’t what we want or need this country to be.

The short version: This is a godawful mess and I wish it had gone the other way, but the main thing is to make it work as best we can now. Hysteria will help nobody.

Llamas remain awesome, of course. Some things, at least, do not change.

Last updated June 27, 2016