Well, they only went and did it. The narrative is pretty clear from the polling totals: the vote for Britain to leave the EU was old and English. The Scots, the Norn Iron, the youth and London were all in favor of remaining, but in the end, it wasn’t enough to get over the hump. Leave won, 52-48.
David Cameron fucked up, and he knows he fucked up, which is why he’s trying to get the hell out of town and leave this steaming pile for the next guy (probably Boris Johnson, the amiable doofus who thought he was the public face of Leave). The irony is, Cameron agreed to this referendum to try to quiet his own Euroskeptics and keep UKIP at arm’s length – and now Nigel Farage, the eminently-punchable leader of UKIP, is out there as the public face of the Leave victory. As more than one person said “not all the Leave voters are racist but all the racists voted Leave.”
And the truly ironic thing is that the straitened economic circumstances that drove the non-racist Leave vote are less a result of EU policy than of the Cameron government’s own commitment to austerity-based recovery. Thanks to the new five-year Parliaments with no snap elections, this is the closest thing people had to a vote against the status quo, a vote against Cameron, and they took it and swung hard. And now it looks like we could seriously see moves toward Scottish secession and Northern Ireland reunification – so Cameron may go down in history as the man who took Britain out of the EU and England out of the United Kingdom.
Here’s the thing: while the UK has a reasonably sturdy economy, any time you upset the applecart it’s going to make things rough. It’s not surprising at all that the pound dropped 10% literally overnight and hasn’t gone back up; a lot of people the world round are going to hold their cards and see how things end up for Britain, and in the meantime, the pound trades at its lowest level against the dollar in three decades. From a strictly selfish point of view, this is a great time to be headed to the UK as a tourist, but you wonder what happens when the next Prime Minister has to go back to square one renegotiating all the trade relationships.
Because here’s the thing: Britain was already loosely tied to the EU. Out of the Euro, given exemptions and rebates, all kinds of extra stuff – and do you think any attempt to get back into the EU is going to come with all those exceptions again? If they go back to the EU with hat in hand, they’re going to be told to shove ha’penny (and rightly so), so I don’t know where Boris is getting this idea that they can suddenly have free movement of Brits around the EU area and free trade while getting concessions on immigration. But then, Boris didn’t have a plan. Nobody did, except for the delusional old farts and their racist fellow travelers who looked at this the way the South looks at Donald Trump or George Wallace: as the avatar of “we’re gonna make things like they used to be.”
But that’s not how the world works.