liberals a lesson they won't soon forget.
Brexit and human rights: winter is coming
Given the toxic politics of Farage, Johnson, Le Pen and Trump, will human rights be enough to resist right-wing nationalism in the wake of Brexit?
Brexit holds little good news for human rights. They were hardly mentioned in the referendum campaigns—not even to gloat that leaving the EU would let the UK remove itself from the Charter of Fundamental Rights. For the Leave campaigners this was doubtless because human rights are low down (but still on) the list of things they love to hate. ... Human rights are not a vote winner—they rank with immigration, EU bureaucrats and climate change science among the things Leavers see as a threat to the British way of life.
This doesn’t mean that rights aren’t talked about. The Tories—who want to scrap the UK’s 1998 Human Rights Act and (some say) withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) entirely—make the claim that they are true champions of fundamental rights. And even that repealing the Human Rights Act will be a net gain for human rights.
The class upholding these rights was heavily pro Remain and they lost. Human rights were seen as a cosmopolitan luxury for a metropolitan elite protecting its wealth or a conspiracy to erode national values and destroy national identity by giving strangers and foreigners the same legal protections as citizens. Either way, caught in this vice, the urban professional middle classes failed to prevail.
This obscene xenophobia has been legitimated and electrified by its prominent role in the Leave campaign. Not only will it sour social relations within the UK, seemingly a petty-minded island nation with fascist tendencies, it has turbo-charged right-wing European politicians like Marine Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands who called for their own referendums immediately.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/openglobalrights/stephen-hopgood/brexit-and-human-rights-winter-is-coming
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