Elites will survive Brexit while young, poor pay the price

I have a confession to make. Even though I make my quids from holding forth on the news, for the longest time I wasn't really sure who Nigel Farage was. His madly grinning idiotic face would pop up in my Twitter and Facebook streams, usually with some comment attached which was obviously meant to be amusing, but without context it seemed to me that he was an actor playing a halfwit spiv, possibly in some well-observed political comedy that hadn't yet made it from the BBC to her antipodean sibling.

The smug, stupid, winningly gin-sodden smirk; the eminently punchable chipmunk cheeks stuffed full of acorn mulch and warm ale; the inescapable air of carefully balanced stage-villainy and buffoonish good cheer all spoke of a top shelf theatrical creation.

Who knew he was the real thing? Not me. Not 16 million English voters who just performed the hilarious trick of kicking themselves deep in their own collective arse. And not John Howard, who found in the UK's Brexit result, "a dramatic reminder to all political leaders around the world that, if you live in a democracy, you've always got to listen very carefully to what people are saying and thinking over a long period of time."

That might pass master as an astute insight, if Howard had been performing an autopsy on the rotting body politic of his much loved mother country. But he wasn't reading the entrails for signs that a vast swathe of the population that had been sacrificed to the purity of neoliberal economic theory had finally got jack of it. No, he was all about denying that racism or xenophobia played any part in a jaw-droppingly racist and xenophobic pig circus of a referendum campaign.

Can't imagine why. I mean it's not like John Howard had a history of dog whistling to bigotry as a distraction from the vast transfer of wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. It's not as though he's some sort of reactionary champion of the overdog or anything, a vile myrmidon whose enduring gift to Australian politics was the creation of a vast theatre of cruelty designed to convince the losers of a new class war that they could still be the winners of an imagined culture war. So, no. It's a bit of a mystery really.

But what's less of a mystery is what happened in the UK. It's happening everywhere. The controlling political classes are not listening "very carefully to what people are saying". They're listening to the instructions issued by their pay masters in the board rooms and bourses. Politics now is a process for delivering ever more obscene wealth into the claws of a global super-elite. The greatest triumph of that elite has been convincing huge numbers of their poorest, most benighted victims that the enemy can be identified by irrelevancies such as skin colour, sexuality, religion or choice of beverage. (Curse those latte drinkers. Curse them all to hell.)

The Brexit referendum might initially seem a setback for the super-elites. After all, the City of London faces the prospect of capital fleeing for the continent as banks and corporates relocate operations and headquarters. Thousands of jobs will go. Although unlike the jobs of machinists in northern factories they won't actually disappear. They will simply move from London to Luxembourg or Paris or Bonn. Some of the workers will likewise move. Some will not, because they no longer enjoy the freedom of movement that came with EU citizenship. The companies, however, will endure. The tax havens, as ever, will thrive.

A generation of young Britons will find their futures constrained. The older, poorer generation who voted overwhelmingly to Leave will not be much inconvenienced by a hardened border, but nor will they enjoy many of the fruits promised them. Johnny Foreigner was not the cause of their ills. That lay closer to home.

Just as it does here.

For independent news coverage, be sure to follow our Facebook feed.