For ages I’ve been threatening American followers with a thread on Brexit. Finally the moment has arrived for me to carry out the threat/thread. Actually two threads: one on how Brexit happened, the other on the screw-ups since 2016 and our current morass. 
If you’re not a UK-er, the two-and-a-half years since the Brexit vote have been a bit like watching cricket: everything seems impossible to understand, and nothing actually happens for months on end.
Things are about to pick up pretty quickly. There will be other news stories in the US with more traction, but Brexit is about to get big.
We got to this point via a cascade of cock-ups, but mostly because of the Conservative Party (our version of the GOP) and its hard-baked divisions over Europe.
The EU is basically business-friendly: at its heart is a giant free-trade area, so you’d think right-wingers would like it. Mrs Thatcher, of all people, loved it so much that she wore this fetching jumper in 1975 to encourage Brits to embrace Europe.
But since '75 Europe has evolved to become a project of political and social integration: it’s allowed workers to move freely between countries; it’s harmonised laws on human rights & consumer protection; and it’s expanded from 9 nations (when the UK joined in 1973) to 28 today.
Generally speaking, Britain has been a real pain in the ass towards the rest of the EU: we’ve demanded all kinds of perks & opt-outs over the years: no to the Euro, different security arrangements from most of Europe, a big rebate on the money we contribute to the EU pot, etc
Despite these perks, for as long as I’ve been a grown-up (roughly 1990 if we’re counting) Conservative “Eurosceptics” have tried to capture their party and take the UK out of Europe altogether. These are usually a minority within the Tory party, but they’re loud, vocal and mean.
Some of them wear top hats; some are immigrant bashers; some are ‘sovereignty’ fetishists. Almost all are nostalgic for a time when Britain ruled the waves, but of course their memories are selective. One of them posted this image during the Rio Olympics.
These guys have hounded every Tory leader since Thatcher; when David Cameron became PM in 2010, they also went after him. To appease his own party he promised that he’d give Britain a referendum on Europe if he won the next election in 2015. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
Cameron didn’t actually want to leave the EU. He knew that British businesses were deeply dependent on European supply chains and the free movement of goods and services, and that actually leaving the EU would alienate the UK from its leading market and supplier.
But he gambled that he’d be able to win the referendum since most MPs didn’t want to leave the EU.
news.sky.com/story/david-ca…
news.sky.com/story/david-ca…
What went wrong? Apart from the arrogance/hubris/cynicism of Cameron’s plan, he’d failed to consider the collateral damage from another one of his bright ideas: to blame the EU (and migrant workers in the UK) for the effects of his own economic policies.
His government had savagely slashed public funding to most departments after taking office. Cameron claimed that the financial crash of 2008 made this unavoidable, but shrinking the state makes Conservative hearts sing so it all felt very convenient. ft.com/content/5fcbd0…
As the cuts began to bite, Tory ministers & Cameron himself started to blame immigrants from the European Union who were entitled to be in the UK as workers, but were now accused of taking school places/doctors' appointments from honest UK-born people. theguardian.com/politics/2013/…
This was as horrible as it was cynical; the right-wing media in the UK echoed the government’s line and targeted (legal) migrants for abuse. This was convenient for Cameron and his government, and suggested someone else was to blame for the pain of austerity.
(In fairness to Cameron and the Tories, the Labour governments from 1997-2010 had already started this kind of immigrant-bashing to appease the right-wing media.) independent.co.uk/news/uk/politi…
It's been argued that Cameron didn't think he'd win the 2015 election outright: polls suggested he’d need to form a coalition, and any coalition partner would force him to sink the referendum plan. But then he DID win, and suddenly we were supposed to have a referendum.
Having unleashed a wave of xenophobia and having blamed migrants from other EU countries for the collapse of public services he had chosen to de-fund, Cameron now began an incredibly embarrassing campaign to persuade the UK public to stay in the EU.
This was a shitshow: not only was Cameron really bad at selling something he’d been beating up for years, but other Tories and the odious Nigel Farage told a bunch of crazy lies about how amazing life could be after we’d alienated our closest economic and political partners.
So many lies: in particular, the one that said we’d make a ton of extra money if we left the EU & we'd spend it on our National Health Service, beloved by everyone in Britain except Tories. (Who are constantly trying to privatise it.) They put this one on a bus & drove it round!
The vote went 52/48 in favour of leaving. While it’s true that a LOT of poorer people voted to leave, the idea that Brexit was a poor people’s revolt is a bit like the claims that the ‘Deplorables’ (rather than wealthier white people) made Trump happen.
With Brexit, the older you were, the more you were likely to vote leave. Age was the biggest predictor of your vote.
ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-…
ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-…
But austerity policies clearly had an effect, especially in areas of the UK that had been disregarded by Tories and by Tony Blair's "New Labour" party. versobooks.com/blogs/2761-bre…
TL;DR: there are lots of reasons for Leave winning the vote, though I’d say the three biggest were austerity, xenophobia and the shameless lies told by Leave supporters in politics and the media. Will pick up the story since 2016 in part two...
