Britain has brexited. What next?
The pound and the PM are freefalling, but that’s not the big thing even now. The big thing is the rejection of almost the entire political establishment, and how this is part of a pattern across what we can still call Europe, and indeed beyond.
Looking at Brexit not as a one off in one country but as part of a pattern, three lessons seem to stand out this morning:
1. The broken economic model that breaks societies has now broken politics.
2. But for now what’s next will be so much worse.
3. Organise.
Yesterday, as Britain went to the polls, the news highlighted how global inequality is even worse than believed. But it also noted how groups are coming together to fight inequality.
In humanity’s best moments, crises have brought a recognition of solidarity. In humanity’s worst moments, crises have precipitated people turning on other people – refugees, immigrants, foreigners, people who look different. Those are the two reactions that people have to massive economic crises – either expand fraternity and find that there are many like you and that we need to work together to make the economy work for all, or take on the other.
What will happen in the next decade? I hope that people choose as they did in America in 1930’s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to cooperate more, and not choose as they did in central Europe in the 1930’s, to hate more. And I don’t know which way it will go.
But yesterday’s shocking new figures on inequality, and today’s dramatic referendum result, both seem to say that it’s time to organise.
