The Null Device

Forth Bridge is down. Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died, aged 99.

All of Britain is officially in mourning for eight days; all non-funereal programming has been suspended on the BBC (with the exception of the childrens' channel CBeebies). In normal times, theatres, music halls and other such establishments would have been shut by law, though given that it's the Ronatimes, they're shut anyway. Presumably the authorities will order Netflix and Animal Crossing to be blocked at ISP level and repurpose the BBC detector vans to find people seditiously watching comedy shows on Zoom.

At any time, this would have been disruptive, though at this moment, it is particularly so. Britain now stands several months after the completion of Brexit, the total triumph of small-minded xenophobic reactionaries against the liberal, cosmopolitan tendency within, and is engaged in a sort of scourging of the shires; this is partly to distract attention from the monumental cock-up the whole project has been on any level other than the quick amphetamine high of chest-thumping nationalism. (Though, to those cheering it on, this is what counts; the Brexit agreement itself, for example, has been negotiated by the UK to be deliberately harsher than necessary, particularly to punish those of the defeated party; consequently, Britain has pulled out of the Erasmus student exchange programme, and pointedly refused to allow visas for touring artists. After all, the reasoning seems to go, we don't want our young people fraternising with the garlic-eaters, do we? The only way a young Briton post-Brexit should meet a European is in the trenches, with bayonet fixed.) In any case, the few months of Britain's post-EU existence have been met with businesses that do any sort of trade with the EU going to the wall, and the government engaging in a spiral of performative nationalism; mandating the flying of the flag on all government buildings, defending the statues of noble slaveholders from Antifa/BLM extremists, introducing laws criminalising protest, and blaming the lack of promised post-Brexit sunlit uplands on stabs in the back from treacherous metropolitan liberal remainer elites.

In a sense, Prince Philip is the Princess Di of Brexitland, the People's Prince 2021 Britain deserves. As Lady Diana—youthful, glamorous, relatably insecure, and caring about people in the way those around her didn't—embodied, in retrospect, the mood of the lifting of the dead hand of Thatcherism in the Cool Britannia New Labour Spring (how little we knew!), Philip—a geriatric racist who, even while alive, looked uncannily out of place among the living, known for his callous “gaffes” and celebrated by taxi drivers and pub bores across the country for his “robust views”—embodies the identity of post-Brexit Britain, indeed, the definition of True Brit in 2021.

Meanwhile in Australia, life goes on mostly as normal, with events going ahead as planned, with one exception: apparently the ABC not only replaced its main channel programming with wall-to-wall royal hagiography but simulcast that to its music channel, preempting a planned Rage tribute to a popular recently deceased musician in Melbourne. It is not clear whether they were required to do so by some imperial-era laws held over from the Menzies era (or possibly reintroduced in the contemporary conservative era), or whether some executive made the call to preemptively fold to the conservative culture warriors before their budget gets cut any further. Meanwhile, in Melbourne, a standup comedian started a routine mocking the Royal Family, not knowing that Philip's death had just been announced, and executed a perfect 360⁰ pivot.

¶ australia brexit prince philip royal family uk 1

As of midnight last night, the UK is no longer a member of the EU. The occasion was met with the characteristic boorishness from the triumphant bigots and pub bores assembled in Parliament Square; meanwhile, in Norwich, signs went up telling people that from now on, only “Queens English” (by which, presumably, they did not mean the English used in Run-DMC lyrics) may be spoken from now on.

In Brussels, the occasion was marked more salubriously: MEPs sang Auld Lang Syne, and some predicted that the UK may return to the EU some day; or in their words, this is “not adieu but au revoir”. However, I suspect that this will never happen.

In the long term, it is unlikely that the UK will rejoin the EU, primarily because, the more time passes, the more likely it is that either the UK, the EU or both will not exist. The imminent end of the EU, of course, was gleefully welcomed by the Faragists and their friends in Moscow and the Reactionary International, with Brexit being intended as the first domino in the unravelling of the post-WW2 liberal international order, and its replacement with a Hobbesian arrangement of spheres of influence, as per Aleksandr Dugin's Eurasianism (Eurasia, of course, would be governed, some parts more directly than others, from Moscow; the English gammon, however, are free to convince themselves, that in the oceanic sphere, Britannia will once again rule the waves as God intended). Of course, the other dominos failed to follow suit, and in fact, the travails of Britain, the one-time exemplar of level-headed pragmatic governance immune to hot-blooded ideological fervor, have arguably inoculated other European states against wanting out. (For example, in Sweden, both the far right and far left repudiated their goals of leaving the EU.) So it looks like Putin's troll farms have their work cut out for them.

The end of the UK seems less remote. Already, Northern Ireland, that unwieldy holdover of Empire, has been more or less sacrificed after the DUP overplayed their hand. (The post-Brexit arrangements will involve an effective border in the Irish Sea, leaving Ireland economically as a cohesive unit, almost as if it wasn't the 17th century any more; meanwhile, public opinion in Northern Ireland is shifting steadily in favour of, or at least non-opposition to, reunification with the Irish Republic, which by now is quite obviously (a) no longer a Catholic sectarian state, (b) currently quite a bit more reasonable than the UK, and (c) a member of a powerful economic club.) Opinion in Scotland was also strongly in favour of remaining in the EU, and is arguably shifting towards support for independence and rejoining the EU as a separate country, where former EU head Donald Tusk said they would be welcome. However, this may not be straightforward.

Scotland, in theory, resolved to rule out independence for at least a generation if not for all time, with their referendum shortly before Britain voted to leave the EU. Of course, part of the incentive was that a Unionist Scotland would have remained in the EU, whereas an independent one would have had to queue for accession somewhere behind Albania. In any case, Prime Minister Johnson, a man known for his personal integrity, has ruled out any further independence referendum for Scotland. Which lands things in a stalemate.

Perhaps Westminster genuinely believe that they can head off any Scottish secession, and presumably over time, neutralise the SNP and reduce Scottish separatism to a quaint form of local colour, alongside Cornish pasties and gurning contests in Carlisle. Possibly there are people in the Conservative and Unionist Party and/or the Home Office who are keen for a test of modern counterinsurgency tactics, and who bet that, had Britain known in 1916 what they do now, they would still have Ireland as a loyal dominion today. And with modern mass-surveillance technology, there is a point there. The security services have the means to get an abundance of data on everyone in the UK today, from social graphs of contacts to GPS traces of mobile phone locations. Given sufficient investment and effort, that could be turned into a social graph of the entire Scottish population, with each person's degree and form of connection to the separatist movement being known, and searchable. If, for example, MI5 need to find a handful of people socially connected to separatist activists but reluctant to get involved, who may be amenable to pressure to act as informants, that is a graph query. On a more acute level, every organisational graph has a few key nodes which, if taken out, could discreetly disrupt its operations. A query could tell the security forces exactly whose brakes would need to fail on a treacherous road in order for recruitment to run out of steam 18 months down the track.

That is assuming that the goal is to crush the rebellious Scots and retain a pacified Scotland as a province of the UK. It could arguably be more rational for the Tories to rile the Scots into leaving, put in a token show of trying to stop them, and rejoice in the fact that the remaining United Kingdom of England and Wales will have a permanent Tory majority for at least a generation. Unless, of course, one is suffering from Dunning-Krugeresque delusions of far greater competence than one actually has.

Of course, this is in the long term. There is also the possibility that the Brexit project will run into trouble in the short term: that the British people's innate knack for free trade and/or True Brit won't suffice to allow them to reconquer the globe and, unconstrained by political correctness and beige Belgian bureaucracy, build a new empire even more glorious than the one Queen Victoria presided over; and instead, that a humbled Britain, bleeding from self-inflicted wounds, will show up in Brussels with a handful of petrol-station roses, begging to be readmitted, and conceding to adopting the Euro, entering the Schengen zone and replacing its power plugs with sensible ones. And as comforting as that thought might be, it is probably the least likely outcome of a crisis, considerably after others, such as Britain becoming a Puerto Rico-style US protectorate (under, of course, the sort of predatory terms one would expect from the Trump kleptocracy, which would probably involve Haiti-level debts on the shoulders of every Briton), joining the Eurasian Union (free trade with huge countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, and no politically-correct human-rights regulations to annoy the Daily Mail readership), or just doubling down and transitioning to a Juche-style ideology of isolationism, with public hangings of “traitors” and “saboteurs” on the BBC every week to distract its starving population.

¶ brexit europe scotland uk 0

So yesterday, England beat Sweden in the world cup, securing their first place in a final in decades, and setting off riotous celebrations. Some football fans, filled with the euphoria of the moment, trashed an IKEA in London, terrorising staff and customers. Others just blocked off streets and jumped on trapped cars.

It’s tempting to see this match, and its aftermath, as the latest flare-up of the Second English Civil War, this time not between the Cavaliers and Roundheads but the Gammons and Snowflakes, and on a broader scale, a Right-vs.-Left grudge match of two fundamentally different world-views of our time. On one hand, England: the bad-boy buccaneers of Brexitland. On the other hand, Sweden, the very symbolic epitome of European liberalism as most unacceptable to the Gammon majority who see themselves as custodians of England’s values, not to mention their fellow travellers in red-state, red-cap America. England may hate the Germans the most, and have hated the French for the longest, but the Swedes are the most egregiously antithetical to the harsh, robust values of the contemporary middle-England whose voice is the Daily Mail. Everything that paper rails against—gender-neutral parenting, multiculturalism, human rights, high taxes spent on the unworthy—is supposedly rampant in Sweden, and if you listen to right-wing older relatives, you will learn that the country is a bankrupt wasteland (due to the inevitable consequences of socialism) and/or an ISIS rape camp.

Sweden is lagom, everything in moderation, with a residual Jante Law stigma against putting oneself above others giving rise to an innate egalitarian tendency. In English, however, it is said that equality is the opposite of quality. We revel in excess. We’re a meritocracy of luxury flats, kept empty as investment units, towering over streets full of hungry, undeserving tramps; a land of teachers and nurses share-housing well into their 40s, and buy-to-let landlords building their well-earned empires, unmolested by redistributive taxation. We’re a nation of hard-working taxpayers who’ve had a gutful of uppity minorities asking to be treated with unearned respect. We're Terry Gilliam jealous of the privileges of imaginary black lesbians, and Morrissey spouting off about Those People. In England, a hedge-fund manager is literally worth thousands of paramedics. And where Sweden believes in universal human rights, inalienable dignity every person is, by definition, entitled to, England, however, divides humans into two camps: “deserving” and “scum”, with the latter to be treated punitively lest they get ideas above their station.

All over the streets outside pubs, mobs of men with St. George flags celebrate jubilantly, blocking traffic and chicken-dancing on the roofs of trapped cars; it's a big boffo day out, like everyone's best mate's stag do. The police come some twenty minutes later and move them on, in their own good time; they’re good lads, just a little overexcited. Hours later, and packs of blokes walk the streets, bellowing out ugly chants about German bombers. We are England, they seem to chant: the English, the English-speaking world, riding the ascending surge of the age. Donald Trump, the commander-in-chief of the English-speaking peoples, is ultimately our leader. Boris Johnson is our shit Churchill for this shit age. Human rights, social justice, Political Correctness, Cultural Marxism, the Frogs and Krauts and all their vino-drinking, garlic-eating chums, all lie vanquished under our boots. And we’re just getting started.

The word on the street here is that the Cup is coming home: home being, of course, England. This is, of course, wishful thinking, but at this stage, it is more plausible than at any recent time. Meanwhile, outside of football, Britain struggles with the consequences of a decision to leave the EU, that has been doubled down upon repeatedly even as it began to look increasingly dubious: Parliament was whipped to irreversibly tear the brakes out of the moving car and throw them out the window. Now, as funding irregularities and connections with Russian government officials emerge, some are talking about the inevitability of a second referendum. If Britain does look like winning the World Cup, perhaps we can expect to see Westminster do a rapid volte-face, approving a second referendum and rushing it through to happen within 24 hours of the victory celebration, in the hope that a groundswell of triumphalism will translate to an increased Leave majority. And in his room deep underneath the Kremlin, the chaos-magus Aleksandr Dugin watches with a smile, knowing that everything is falling into place exactly to plan.

Brexit, Trump and one world cup, all under the watchful eyes of the Kremlin.

¶ brexit culture england football football hooliganism nationalism rightwingers sweden 2

Seemingly inspired by Turkish strongman Erdoğan's resounding 52-48% victory over the weekend, UK Prime Minister Theresa May has called a snap general election for 8 June, calling a vote to overturn the 2011 Fixed Parliaments Act in the process. With Labour in disarray, the election will almost certainly result in a Conservative landslide and an Erdoğan-sized mandate to reshape the United Kingdom as it leaves the European Union to become a sort of Singapore of the Atlantic; undercutting the decadent vino-drinking continentals with lower taxes, wages and regulations, and a workforce that knows its place (because any other places it could have gone for a better deal have forever been closed off) and making common cause with the world's tyrants, no longer shackled by politically-correct notions of “human rights”.

The Labour Party would nominally be the opposition to the Tories, as they were throughout much of the 20th century, though are not providing much of an opposition. Under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, a pre-Blairite socialist once written off as a relic of a bygone era, they have swung firmly in favour of Britain leaving the European Union, whipping their MPs to support Article 50. This is either in an attempt to win back the xenophobic vote or out of some delusional belief in the myth of “Lexit” (left-wing Brexit): the delusion that, having cut its ties with the neoliberal free-marketeers of the European Union, Britain will be free to become a sort of rainy Cuba, a pre-Thatcherite socialist arcadia where the coal mines never closed, the state-run supermarkets only stock one variety of tea, and we're all somewhat poorer and shabbier but equal and happy, all watched over by a cadre of shop stewards in ill-fitting brown suits. On the issue of leaving the EU, there is no difference between the two parties; only on the mythology and teleology of what doing so will signify.

It wasn't always like this, but it was for longer than many would think. When Corbyn ran for the Labour leadership, he was an outsider candidate, put forward half-jokingly next to a field of focus-grouped Blair-manqués struggling to find a selling point for Labour. (One of them actually said that one of Labour's values is “having strong values”; the mutability of those values, presumably, making it easier to respond to polling and market research.) A candidate who actually believed in something—not to mention something as radical as socialism (but not to worry, democratic socialism)—was quite exciting. Corbyn prevailed by a broad margin and saw off several leadership coups (attributed to either traitorous neoliberal Blairites or ordinary Labour MPs questioning their new leader's ability to actually lead, depending on whom one listens to); he is currently presiding over the “regeneration” (and, inevitably, downsizing) of Labour into a more traditionally leftist direction, albeit without the benefit of shipyards, steelworks and mines full of dues-paying industrial workers to provide a natural constituency for a party of labour. (Labour, of course, started as an offshoot of the union movement, a parliamentary party for those whose stake in the system was their labour, rather than property or pedigree. This raison d'être began to diminish with the shift away from heavy industry, which started in the 70s but accelerated under Thatcher; by the 90s, it was a ghost of its former self. It was mostly Britpop-fuelled euphoria and/or Tony Blair's Bonoesque charisma that kept Labour going, with New Labour's Tory-lite policies attracting a critical mass of centrist careerists who wouldn't have touched socialism with a bargepole, and whom Corbyn is now doing his best to purge. That and Thatcher having tested the hated Poll Tax in Scotland, delivering virtually that entire country to Labour, in time for it to shore up Blair's successive administrations; though the Tories shrewdly wiped this out by convincing Labour to lead the No campaign against Scottish independence, and so deliver their entire base there to the Scottish National Party, effectively holing Labour below the waterline. So, in summary, the revival of Labour in the 90s was about as substantial as the revival of Swinging Sixties cool that the music journalists of the time were going on about the latest Blur/Oasis/Elastica single being the epitome of.)

The problem with this new direction for Labour is that it jettisons many of the tenets of liberalism and openness. Corbyn made only the most half-hearted and token attempts at campaigining to remain in the EU, and once the result was in, enthusiastically jumped to the victorious side. Protectionism trumps openness; nationalism trumps solidarity. The traditional anglosocialist utopia of Labour looks a lot like the traditional Little England of UKIP, with its distrust of all things foreign; the only difference is, in one case, there is a strict hierarchy, with everyone knowing his or her place, whereas in the other, everybody's equal (though some are more equal than others; every socialist utopia needs its cadres and vanguard party, after all). As neoliberalism dies, it's the “liberalism” part that is jettisoned; the hierarchies of oppressive power continue, as they always have. (Similarly, across the centre-right parties and think tanks of the world, the dry, bloodless academic writings of Hayek and Friedman are quietly being bumped from reading lists, replaced with Julius Evola and translations of Aleksandr Dugin; Ayn Rand, however, retains her popularity, her message of the inherent rightness of power and privilege, predating the Mont Pélerin Society, will outlive the myth of the tide that lifts all boats.) That Labour is facing electoral slaughter is not much comfort, given that the result will be the coronation of an authoritarian unelected leader into a position of unassailable power to remake the United Kingdom in her image; our own Lee Kwan Yew, or perhaps a British Erdoğan.

I currently live in the electorate of Islington North. Jeremy Corbyn is my constituency MP, and I voted for him in the last general election, as he was a fine constituency MP. However, he has not shown himself to be a plausible party leader, and after his betrayal on Brexit, I will not be able to vote for him in the upcoming election. I am thinking of voting for the Lib Dems; they are the largest party standing against Brexit and its attendant xenophobic isolationism, and the most likely to unseat Corbyn in liberal, cosmopolitan Islington North. Ordinarily, I would consider the Green Party, or the Pirate Party if they ran here, but in this election, and under the first-past-the-post system, it is important to vote for the lesser evil rather than treating electoral choice as a litmus test of purity of convictions. (See also: Jill Stein, the US Green Party candidate whose electoral messaging seemed almost precisely calculated to undermine Clinton and get Trump into power.) And right now, with the two largest parties offering two different variants on the same Scarfolk-meets-Royston-Vasey dystopia, the role of opposition and/or lesser evil has fallen on the Liberal Democrats.

¶ brexit jeremy corbyn labour politics tories uk 2

A few days ago, I travelled from London to Amsterdam by train. I caught the Eurostar from St. Pancras International to Brussels-Midi, and then caught a Thalys high-speed train, along the Belgian/Dutch coast with its grey concrete flatness, to my final destination. The journey went smoothly; check-in was quick, the trains were on time, and everything went to plan.

Two days later, the British Parliament voted, as expected, to unconditionally authorise leaving the EU. There was dissent (Corbyn's fragile authority over the Labour Party eroded further, with many MPs defying the whip to vote nay), but it meant little; an overwhelming majority voted aye, with a good proportion preceding their votes with speeches on why leaving the EU is a catastrophically bad idea and the action they're about to vote in favour of is stupid and/or undemocratic. Three cheers for the Westminster parliamentary system!

I have travelled by Eurostar before, but now it did feel a bit like the last days of an era. I can't help but think that, in five years' time, a journey such as mine will be more like a trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, down to the onerous visa paperwork and customs checks required by the granite-hard Brexit we're now inevitably spiralling to, and the sense of exoticism of being among foreigners whose ways are not like ours. Indeed, it's not clear whether the Eurostar will still be running then; a lot of its business is contingent on both political and economic relations with the continent, and if steep tariff barriers go up and Britain reorients towards its former Empire, or perhaps towards a coalition of nations like Turkey and Saudi Arabia it shares a disdain for politically-correct notions like “human rights” with, there'll be far less demand for travel across the Channel. (On the other hand, we just might need another runway or two at Heathrow.)

Progress is not a one-way ratchet; it can slip back. Just as there were serfs in feudal Europe who were descended from the free citizens of Greece and Rome, today's world, with all its mundane annoyances, may be an unfathomable, quasi-mythical golden age to our descendants. For example, in ten years' time in Russia, there will be a generation of young people who have no awareness of LGBT issues; they will, of course, know from playground whispers and insulting graffiti that homosexuality exists, but it will be either associated with child molesters or else be something disgusting and unnatural that happens in seedy places alongside crime and squalor; meanwhile, the very idea of transgenderedness will be the stuff of circus sideshows. (The young Russians who happen to be gay or transgendered will not have a pleasant time.) By the same token, the generation of British young adults some ten years later will, for the most part, have never travelled to Europe or associated with Europeans, in much the way that the typical young Briton today has never spent time in China and knows little about contemporary Chinese culture. To them, and to whom tales of Easyjetting to a weekender at Berghain, spending a semester studying on Erasmus in Lisbon or Leuven, or hanging out or going out with people whose first language isn't English and whose cultural assumptions differ subtly from one's own in a thousand ways will seem as exotic as the world of pre-war travelogues. Few of them will have met an European, and the image of Europeans will converge onto outlandish stereotypes: half berets and baguettes, half tabloid slights about garlic and vino, loose sexual morés and poor personal hygiene, and the odd bit of weirdly displaced Islamophobia or reheated red-baiting (“I heard that Belgium is an ISIS rape camp/all the supermarket shelves in Denmark are empty and people are fighting like rats over canned food because their economy has been ruined by socialism!”).

¶ brexit europe politics uk 0

As of Friday morning, all hell has broken loose in the UK.

As nobody predicted*, the British voting public voted to leave the EU, 52% to 48%. Well, the English and Welsh voting public, mostly; Scotland and Northern Ireland voted strongly to remain. Immediately, things started going tits-up. The pound cratered, experiencing its largest drop in value since the Major government's withdrawal from the European exchange rate mechanism. Meanwhile, Google reported a surge in searches for “what is the EU” and “what happens if we leave the EU”, and the media began filling with reports of sheepish voters saying that they voted Leave because they expected Remain to win and just wanted to show their anger at the political class. Meanwhile, as soon as the result was safely in, the anti-EU politicians who backed the Leave campaign started to walk back their promises. There would be no £350 million for the NHS, no sudden end to the rights of foreigners to breathe our precious British air, no abolition of the VAT on power bills. Cornwall, which voted strongly to leave, nervously demanded reassurance that the hefty EU funding it gets would be replaced, pound for pound, from all the money not being sent to the garlic-eating crooks in Brussels; the silence with which its inquiries were answered must have done little to reassure it. A petition to have a second referendum (which, it turns out ironically, had been started before the result by a Leave supporter wanting to keep his anti-EU crusade alive in the event of a defeat) has, to date, received three and a half million signatures; this figure is still climbing.

The only people who did well out of this were the far right, who found themselves legitimised and emboldened. No longer was xenophobia something to deny, or tenuously rationalise, but a natural part of the order of Man; loathing and disgust for those unlike ourselves are nothing to be ashamed of, the message said, but perfectly natural and normal; indeed, perhaps it's those who don't feel visceral revulsion of the Other that are abnormal or sick. The far right and various bigots lost no time in taking this lesson to heart and intimidating foreign-looking people; all over Britain, Polish families found threatening letters in their letterboxes, a community centre was vandalised, and dark-skinned people found themselves being told by strangers (who, presumably, lacked the intellectual nous to know that they were probably not EU passport holders) that they're next. Even Laurie Penny, the (white, London-born) cyber-Rosa Luxembourg of this age, was told to go home by a man wearing a St. George's flag as a cape, because she looked like an art student, and thus wasn't, in his opinion, really English. I must say that, to an Australian, all this sounds uncomfortably familiar, right down to the wearing of flags as capes and/or markers of belligerent idiocy. (Incidentally, Penny's analysis of Brexit is well worth reading.)

Having realised that they had set the country on a course for economic, if not political, devastation, politicians in Westminster started to panic. A defeated David Cameron resigned tearfully, undoubtedly freighted with the complicatedly mixed feelings that he'd no longer be remembered primarily for having sexually interfered with a pig's head, but for something far, far worse. In doing so, he stated that it would not be him but his successor on whom the responsibility for pushing down the detonator and starting Britain's irrevocable exit from the EU would fall. All the obvious candidates in the Conservative Party hastily demurred; now now, they said, there's no need to be hasty. Britain had climbed out onto the ledge and announced its intention to jump, but upon seeing the distance to the hard ground below, was having second thoughts. This wasn't good enough for EU officials, who insisted that Britain had chosen to jump, and must now jump quickly, before the uncertainty upsets their markets (and also, so that the big gory splat serves as a warning to their own domestic Euro-refuseniks, now agitating for the chance to leave), and if it doesn't, they'll consult with lawyers to see if they can give it a helpful push.

Meanwhile, in staunchly pro-EU Scotland and Northern Ireland, things started to get interesting. Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon wasted no time, announcing that legislation for a second Scottish independence referendum was being drawn up, and that EU consuls would be invited to a summit in Edinburgh within two weeks to discuss ways of keeping Scotland in the EU. There was also the possibility that Scotland and Northern Ireland's legislatures may be able to veto the process of secession; this is disputed by some constitutional experts, though given the labyrinthine complexity of Britain's constitution (which is actually a collection of many documents), it may inject some doubt into the equation, or at least compel Whitehall to let Scotland have its referendum and leave. (After the last Scottish referendum, the issue was declared resolved for all time; theoretically, if Whitehall forbade a second referendum and the Scottish government went ahead with it, those involved could possibly be charged with treason. Much as the rebels of the Irish Easter Rising, a hundred years ago, were; that, of course, didn't end well for the unity of the Kingdom.)

So the pound is tanking, financial companies based in London (who comprise a big part of Britain's economy) are scoping out office space in Frankfurt and Dublin, and our elected leaders are falling on their swords, knifing each other in the back, or playing hot-potato with a live grenade, whilst those who pulled the pin out wonder whether it would be possible to, somehow, find it and put it back in; meanwhile, neo-Nazis are using this as official sanction to attack anyone they regard as not belonging. Welcome to Britain, 2016.

Oh, and in the time it took to write this article, an additional 18,000 or so people have signed the petition.

* YouGov came closest to predicting it, but got the sides the other way around, predicting a 52% win for Remain.

¶ brexit england ireland northern ireland politics rightwingers scotland stupidity uk 0

Polls have opened in Britain's membership referendum; despite heavy rain (and in some areas, flooding), attendance is reportedly high, which is probably a factor in the rising fortunes of Remain in polls and on the betting markets (though there are rumours that part of the latter is manipulation by hedge funds). Having said that, the result is still very much up in the air; the closest to a confident statement anybody has made about it is that it will be close, though a recent poll has predicted a 51%-49% victory for Remain; a victory in name, but not really a victory.

In my opinion, there are three ways this could turn out:

• Leave could prevail. In the short term, there would be much uncertainty; the pound would take a hit and there'd be a near-term economic downturn. Perhaps Prime Minister Boris Johnson, his Brexit gamble having served its purpose, would fudge some kind of reconciliation with the EU, or perhaps the UK would still be out. All those Leavers who were looking forward to an end of the effects of globalisation and a return to jobs for life and old-fashioned community values would be in for what Milton Friedman might have called a short sharp shock; the new Britain, afloat on the high seas of international finance, would have to compete on some basis, and being a gateway to the European Union (which, for all its problems, is a huge economy) would no longer be that basis, so it'd come down to low wages, lax regulations and/or tax-haven-style opacity. A permanently low pound (and the absence of any automatic rights for British citizens to look for work abroad) would ensure the first point; the other two could come as political necessity, as governments, needing to attract business, cut everything from human rights to environmental regulations. So, post-Brexit Britain would look not so much as a cozy worker's utopia in vintage bunting as a dirty sweatshop and equally dirty tax haven, whoring out both its historic reputation and its captive population. (As one might expect, Russia's oligarchs expect a bonanza after Britain votes to leave the EU; the depressed pound will let them snap up more prime London property, and the receding threat of transparency rules will make London a very comfortable environment for the wealthy and corrupt; for the rest of us, not so much.)

  (That is only considering what would happen in the UK itself. In Europe proper, Britain leaving would embolden its own anti-EU fringe elements, the Marine Le Pens and Alternativen für Deutschland and the don't-call-us-Nazis sticking their noses into the tents of government all over the Nordic countries. Once, say, France or Germany left, the EU would effectively be finished as a significant entity. So border posts go up, cooperation gives way to competition and mistrust, and soon armies are being built up, just in case the neighbours try something. Meanwhile, on the Eastern fringe, Russia jockeys for control over the Baltic states. Poland decides, for perfectly understandable reasons, that it needs a nuclear arsenal, then Germany (hemmed in between nuclear France and nuclear Poland) decides it needs one too. Finland starts preparing for another bitter winter war. And around Europe, nationalist parties are on the rise, and skinheads are attacking foreigners, liberals, gays, and anybody outside a narrow view of their country's national identity. The old post-WW2 world of Interrail and EasyJet, of Erasmus scholarships and weekenders at Berghain and complaints about drunken English stag parties, will seem like a long-lost golden age, and the future will look like the millennia-old killing field. In this world, even if you did manage to get an EU passport before the door slammed shut, Europe won't be a welcoming place to go.)

• Remain could, narrowly, win. 51-49, 53-47, or similar. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief for a moment, given that the UK is not crashing out of the EU. The Brexit faction, being reasonable people, realise that the people have spoken and accept their vanquishment graciously, dissolving and going away. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage audition as presenters for the next reboot of Top Gear. Britain's bout of anti-European mania is over, as the nation looks to embrace a progressive, inclusive vision beyond its borders.

  Who are we kidding? Almost half the population will have voted to leave the EU; the right-wing press are still around and still despise the EU and the progressive impositions it makes. There would be calls of fraud, demands for a recount, perhaps even allegations that MI5/Mossad/the Masons tampered with ballots. (It's likely that Russian election observers would obligingly provide “evidence” of electoral fraud, as they did in Scotland.) Even if the conspiracy theories didn't get beyond the jet-fuel/steel-beams credibility threshold, Little England's low-intensity war against the EU would continue for another generation. UKIP would get MEPs elected, who would take up seats in Brussels and behave like carbon monoxide molecules in its bloodstream, taking up space and blocking its operation. Tory politicians (and perhaps Labour ones) would find that pandering to Europhobia is politically profitable. The conflict would flare up from time to time, and might again drag Britain towards the edge of the abyss.

• Remain could win decisively, with at least 60%. Perhaps Leave's figure would be as low as the Crazification Factor, the 25% or so of the population who either are actual swivel-eyed lunatics or merely willing to unbridle their id and howl at the moon in the privacy of the polling booth and the internet comment forum, though that's not necessary. In any case, Remain would have a clear majority. The opportunists on the Leave side, having exhausted its usefulness, would jump ship and not look back, and however hard the hardcore and their backers in the tabloids bloviated about the evils of Europe, they'd be dismissed as yesterday's cranks. (Today's cranks would, of course, find some other, more topical, issue to latch onto.) This is the only scenario that could be considered an unambiguous victory for Remain.

I'm hoping for the third scenario. It could still happen, though, if polls are to be believed, is unlikely. If the polls are to be believed, the second scenario is the most likely, which means that things will fester on, albeit in a less acute state. Though recent history has shown that polls aren't what they used to be; perhaps we're entering a chaotic period of history, where assumptions no longer hold. In any case, we'll probably know between 2am and 7am.

¶ brexit eu politics uk 1

Britain's tantrum about whether to remain a member of the EU has been burbling on malevolently, like some kind of grotesque pantomime. The Leave side has been advancing spectacularly, given largely a free ride by the right-leaning tabloids, and has emerged from the depths of absurdity to within grasp of victory. Leave has been fronted mainly by a disingenuous Boris Johnson, using all his Oxford debating society skills, Telegraph editorial experience and classically-educated raconteurial eloquence to posit an argument he is on record as not believing in, buttressed by a Gish Gallop of trivially debunkable urban legends and outright untruths about overbearing EU regulations. it is clear that for him, the prize is not the UK, free at last of the tethers of Brussels and sailing the high seas like a mighty Elizabethan galleon, once again regaining its world-spanning empire due to the innate British genius for free trade, but Boris Johnson moving into 10 Downing St., perhaps even before the next general election. To his right is Nigel Farage, the affable (if you're an older white Englishman, at least) reactionary, pint in hand, telling it like it is and pouring scorn on left-wing metropolitan-elite bullshit, from global warming and finite natural resources to ladies in the workplace and smoking being harmful.

The past week started as a victory lap for the Leave campaign, buoyed by polls giving them a commanding 6-10% lead over Remain (also likely to be inflated by the asymmetry of engagement between the two sides; it is hard to imagine someone who loves the EU with the passion with which the hardcore Europhobes despise it). Remain seemed to be flailing desperately, the chancellor even resorting to threatening voters with punitive tax hikes if Leave won. Leave, meanwhile, stopped pretending that their argument is about bloodless economic calculation and got to the real (red) meat of the argument: the Bloody Foreigners. A poster was produced, showing vast queues of brown-skinned, scarily Islamic-looking refugees befouling England's green and pleasant land with their presence, its framing (wittingly or otherwise) lifted from a Nazi propaganda film from the 1940s. Then there was the flotilla: Farage (the champion of the British fisherman, who sat on the EU Fisheries Committee but declined to attend most of the meetings) leading a group of fishing boats up the Thames in protest, with a counterprotest led by Bob Geldof.

And then there was the murder.

Jo Cox, a Labour MP and human rights campaigner, had been on the Remain flotilla. The following day, she was back in her seat in northern England, holding an electoral surgery, when a man stabbed and shot her, shouting “Britain first”. She did not survive, and became the first sitting British politician murdered since Spencer Perceval in 1812. The right-wing pro-Leave press moved swiftly to disavow any suggestion that the murder was in any way political, let alone connected to an interpretation of their side's arguments, trying to spin the killer as a random lunatic, as likely to have been motivated by, say, the ghost of Freddie Mercury talking to him through his toaster as anything else. That interpretation was not helped when he was found to have had connections with neo-Nazi groups (including Britain First, if a photograph of him at one of their events is authentic), nor when, in court, he gave his name as “Death To Traitors Freedom For Britain” (though Louise Mensch, that reliably south-pointing compass of the British Torysphere, did make a heroic attempt to claim his words as semantically meaningless gibberish, or in her words, “wibble wibble I'm a hatstand”).

By now, pretty much everyone has conceded that the murder was politically motivated, which leaves Leave with the bind of trying to dissociate themselves from extremists further up the continuum of xenophobic opinion from them; meanwhile, polls show that some voters have started deserting Leave (though not in droves; the two sides are now polling neck and neck). Perhaps they're asking themselves about some of the people they've discovered themselves sharing a side in the debate with.

It's three days until the referendum itself, and the result is still very much up in the air. Polling suggests that Leave still have the edge, while the betting markets predict a Remain victory. If Britain votes to leave the EU, it will, in my opinion, be a catastrophically bad decision for reasons too numerous to go into here. If Remain ekes out a narrow victory, though, the sense of relief will be tinged by the awareness that, were it not for the brutal murder of a fundamentally decent human being, our ancestral hatred of the Frogs and Krauts and fear of a brown-skinned Other would almost certainly have shifted it to Leave. And it does make one wonder what proportion of the 40%+ of the population expected to vote Leave would agree with Mr. Death To Traitors Freedom For Britain that Jo Cox, MP was, if not a traitor to Britain, part of an enemy elite hostile to the “silent majority”.

¶ brexit crime eu neo-nazis politics rightwingers uk 0