Brexit

Before the Brexit polls, my dad asked me the reasons for Leave. I googled and didn’t find any reasons which sounded very convincing. And yet Brexit happened. What was I missing? What articles had Google missed?!

Today, you’d think that the usual after-the-event geniuses would be able to come up with reasons. So what are we hearing now? Why did they vote to Leave?
1)      There were those who always hated being part of the EU, joined by those who thought immigration was taking away jobs, and the racists who just hated immigrants.
(Funnily enough, the immigrant issue wasn’t really that big a deal. At least not for Britain. I wonder if Angela Merkel rolling out the red carpet for Syrians created a perception problem that couldn’t be fought with facts).
2)     Then there were the many who felt that only the city of London benefitted while the rest of Britain got nothing.
3)     For some politicians, this was a chance to become visible, and to rise:
“Better to reign in hell than serve in Brussels.”
4)     Others may have been gambling, assuming that the EU cannot afford to lose Britain and would be forced to concede preferable deals even if Britain left.
5)     Another gamble may have been that if Britain quit, it could be the beginning of the end for the EU. And once the EU disbands, everyone would be in the same situation as Britain. Except Britain would have a head start in finding a way forward.
6)     The price tag of EU membership could be quoted: £350 million/week; the cost of leaving, on the other hand? Highly subjective; and debatable. And thus not convincing to the common man:
“The entire practice of modelling the future in terms of ‘risk’ has lost credibility.”

Obviously, how a campaign is run matters:
“The slogan ‘Take back control’ was a piece of political genius. It worked on every level between the macroeconomic and the psychoanalytic. Think of what it means on an individual level to rediscover control… What was so clever about the language of the Leave campaign was that it spoke directly to this feeling of inadequacy and embarrassment, then promised to eradicate it.”

And so, ironically, “The least ‘enslaved’ nation in the EU just threw off its ‘shackles’”.

None of that sounds very logical, right? Hardly looking like a thought through, well analyzed decision? And now we have Scotland wanting another referendum to become independent. And a petition to re-do the Brexit referendum itself! Hardly the way you’d expect, well, a First World country to act?

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarJune 29, 2016 at 2:51 PM

    You have presented the points better than my vague discomfort with the situation. As you rightly said, these points are not great "convincers".

    EU is getting dismantled maybe, like the USSR (not exactly however, because USSR crumbled like the pack of cards). The truth is that the glue for unity is weak in these cases.

    This is not always the case with some amalgam countries. (I would say countries like Japan are non-Amalgam.) In comparison, in the US, which is a mixed culture population, the federal approach is serving well and the "glue" for unity is present in some manner. Even India, the unlikely candidate for unity, is managing for some 60+ years as one country, even if it has a long and weary road before it towards becoming a well adjusted nation.

    On the whole, it appears in principle that unity is an uphill task whereas the prevalence of individuality is common.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more