Philip Pullman on the 1,000 causes of Brexit [View all]

[BlueMTexpat]

The dog-whistle call of Nigel Farage’s racism and the lies of Boris Johnson are the final act of a tragedy that began 70 years ago

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jun/25/philip-pullman-on-the-1000-causes-of-brexit?CMP=fb_gu

... There is our country’s post-imperial reluctance to let go of the idea that we are a great nation, combined with our post-second-world-war delusion that we were still a great power. That was why we refused the chance to join the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, and our infatuation with our own greatness was sufficiently undamaged by Suez in 1956 to make us refuse to join the EEC when that got going with the Treaty of Rome in 1958. If we’d committed ourselves to Europe early, with everyone else, we’d now have a much deeper understanding of our real relationship to the continent, namely that we belong there.

Then there was General de Gaulle’s double “Non” in 1963 and 1967, which kept us out when we finally thought it might be a good idea to join. Goodness knows what the source of his hostility was, but it wouldn’t be at all surprising if his notoriously prickly character was still harbouring some ancient resentment from his treatment by this country during the war.

But if we’d had the chance to join early, we could have had a much greater influence on the way the European project developed, and we’d feel much more at home in it now. Instead, we were bewitched (some of our leaders still are) by the fantasy of the “special relationship”, invented by Winston Churchill and entirely ignored by the other party to it, the US. Caught up in the glamour of this imaginary nonsense, toadying, deluded, we’ve been facing the wrong way for the past 70 years.
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But the most immediate cause of the disaster this country suffered last night was the flippant, careless, irresponsible way David Cameron tried to buy off the right wing of his own party by offering them a referendum. I don’t think that device should have any place at all in a parliamentary democracy: it slips far too easily into a sort of raucous populism. We elect MPs so that they can have the time and the resources to make important decisions. That’s what they should do.

But then, if we had a properly thought-out constitution instead of a cobwebbed, rotten, diseased and decaying mess of a patched-up, cobbled-together, bloated, corrupted, leaking and stinking hulk, we wouldn’t have come to this point anyway. We desperately need fundamental change. But who can bring us that now?