Brexit es el resultado de muchos factores, no hay un motivo único por el que la gente votó Brexit. Si algo hicieron bien en la campaña fue prometer de todo a todo el mundo
A unos que habría más dinero para la NHS
a otros que echarían a los forasteros
a los de ascendencia hindú o pakistaní que cortarían la libre circulación de europeos y ampliarían visas familiares
a otros que recuperarían los caladeros pesqueros
a los agricultores que podrían utilizar productos prohibidos
a los que añoraban el imperio que se librarían del yugo alemán
pero a TODOS les dijeron que no habría consecuencias negativas, primero porque nadie estaría tan orate como para salir del mercado común y la unión aduanera. Luego que sí, que saldrían de los dos pero que en todo caso no importaba porque la UE dependía del dinero y el comercio del reino unido así que conseguirían un acuerdo exactamente igual en 10 minutos, luego que si no había acuerdo que mejor aún porque saldrían con normas WTO que les permitirán firmar otros tratados inmediatamente con cualquiera y cuando se ve que no es así, el ministro de hacienda sale diciendo que sí, que bueno, que algunos sectores van a sufrir
Ahora algunos vienen con la historia que esto último era el objetivo inicial y que todo el mundo lo sabía y que habían hecho un análisis del impacto económico político y social y aun así decidieron votar leave porque estaban en desacuerdo con el funcionamiento de instituciones que ni siquiera sabían que existían
y termino con otro artículo de Fintan O'Toole, cuyos análisis son bastante acertados en mi opinión. Donde explica que el brexit ha sido un experimento de cierto "nacionalismo inglés" y cómo va a afectar a los otros tres países que conforman el reino unido
Independence Day will expose Brexit as a ruse to free an imaginary nation | Fintan O’Toole
Independence Day will expose Brexit as a ruse to free an imaginary nation
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Fintan O'Toole
Next Friday, Britain officially leaves the EU but it’s difficult to see who or what is being liberated. Perhaps an England without London?
We know what the week running up to the glorious day of
Brexit is supposed to be like. A few nights before the original chosen date of
29 March 2019, Boris Johnson was “in conversation” with his old boss at the
Telegraph, Charles Moore, at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. Johnson was out of office then, and free to indulge himself without constraint.
He told the audience that this “was meant to be the week when church bells were rung, coins struck, stamps issued and bonfires lit to send beacons of freedom from hilltop to hilltop. This was the Friday when Charles Moore’s retainers were meant to be weaving through the moonlit lanes of Sussenssus, half blind with scrumpy, singing
Brexit shanties at the tops of their voices and beating the hedgerows with staves.” Moore replied that Johnson was right, “but in fact I had already stood these good people down, since I could see what was coming”.
This was incestuous Old Etonian/Old Telegraphian joshing, though if anyone on the Remain side of the argument had characterised Leave supporters, even in jest, as drunken yokels, there would have been no end to the outrage. But it is telling nonetheless. It points to one of the great underlying difficulties of Brexit’s Independence Day. It poses as a moment of national liberation, a people freeing itself from the oppression of an alien empire. But what “people” are being liberated?
That the leader of the revolution enjoys imagining his trustiest trinc as the Wurzels suggests the awkwardness of the question. For the great problem of Brexit is that it is a populist project without a people, a nationalist project without a nation.
During the referendum campaign in 2016, Johnson puzzled many of his own supporters by claiming Brexit itself as, of all things,
“the great project of European liberalism”. This may be like claiming puritanism as the great project of sensual liberation, but it does make a superficial kind of sense. The central idea of Brexit is indeed part of 18th- and 19th-century European culture: the nation state as the primary locus of political loyalty and as the collective manifestation of a unified “people”. Brexit has to present itself in these terms: a suppressed people rising up, as Jacob Rees-Mogg puts it, to set itself “free of the heavy yoke of the European Union”
But here there is a great irony: Britain is not and never has been a nation state. For most of its history as a state, it has been at the heart not of a national polity, but of a vast multinational and polyglot empire. And the UK is itself a four-nation amalgam of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is no single pre-EU UK “nation” to return to. There is no unified “people” to whom power is being returned. And this is the contradiction that the Brexit project cannot even acknowledge, let alone resolve.
Scotland and Northern Ireland rejected Brexit even more emphatically in the
general election of 2019 than they had done in the referendum of 2016 and a clear majority of voters in the UK as a whole voted in 2019 for parties that promised a second referendum and an opportunity to stay in the EU. So while Johnson likes to talk of 31 January as “this pivotal moment in our national story”, there is neither a settled nation nor a shared story. Brexit is not Northern Ireland’s story. It is not Scotland’s story. It is not even London’s story. It is the national origin myth of the place that Anthony Barnett, co-founder of openDemocracy, calls
“England without London”.
There is no doubt that Brexit has worked in the way that nationalist movements try to – it has united people across great divides of social class and geography in the name of a transcendent identity. Many of those people, if not quite drunk on scrumpy and bawling Brexit shanties, will feel real joy on 31 January. But the problem is that this unity of national purpose functions within a nation that does not actually exist: non-metropolitan England and parts of English-speaking Wales. And it is purchased at the very high price of creating much deeper divisions between England-without-London and the rest of the British-Irish archipelago.
There is a particular paradox here when we think back on that great Brexit slogan: take back control. It is that the parts of the UK that have actually “taken back control” into their own local democratic institutions reject Brexit; while the parts that support Brexit have no such institutions. The Scottish parliament, the Welsh Senedd and the Northern Ireland assembly have all voted overwhelmingly in recent weeks to
reject the withdrawal agreement. (Their votes will of course be ignored by the government in London.)
But the voters in England who actually want Brexit are not recognised at all as a “people” with a voice of their own. They are nationalist revolutionaries without a political nation. They are creating a country for themselves, but it is one that dare not speak its name.
At the heart of this dilemma is the illusion that a fragile multinational state can play with the fire of nationalism yet not get burned. The allure of leaving a larger multinational political entity and going your own way is very potent. But once you establish it as the core value of politics, where do you stop? Brexit sets in motion the logic that shared sovereignty is unnatural and that all “peoples” must return to the pure dominion of their ancient nations.
However, it then commands the tide of separatism to stop at the current borders of the UK. It dictates that the nation must take back control of its own fate in order to inaugurate for itself what Johnson and Rees-Mogg unblushingly hail as a “golden age”. But apparently the only nation that is supposed to hear this thrilling call of destiny is the new England that has been conjured into being. You would need to be half blind on scrumpy not to see the fatal contradiction.
• Fintan O’Toole is a columnist with the Irish Times
