Carl Sagan, the astronomer and writer, was absolutely right when he said that to understand the present, you must first understand the past. So whilst Brexit seems in so many respects to be a very modern phenomenon – with the widespread use cutting edge information technology, algorithms and data harvesting – it is taking us down a path that is all-too-well trodden.
The legacy of the financial crash of 2008 is not very different from the that of 1929, and certainly the reactions that followed it were much the same: pulling up the drawbridges, ring-fencing money and resources, and repelling outsiders, instead of responsible, intelligent progressive reform, across national borders where necessary, for the common good.
What has been set in train by the September 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers is the dismantling of liberal democracy and open international borders. In a decade when we needed to see the rise of responsible bankers, regulators, politicians and economists, we have seen the rise of Trump, Brexit and populism. The world has certainly changed, but not in an ordered, structured or positive way.
Right wing populism took hold across the western world after the crash of almost a century ago, and it is something of an under-statement to say that it did not end well. The victims of it were then the poorest and most oppressed in our society. A lot of them – by dint of their religious faith, sexual orientation or whatever – were obviously different. Nobody but perhaps a small handful of individuals – arms manufacturers among them – came out of that experience any richer and it left entire nations impoverished and broken.
The message, “You are hard done by and you deserve better” is an easy one for politicians to deliver. Eminently harder is to say, “We got it wrong, now this is how we can fix it”. It is a mistake to disassociate Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency from Brexit – indeed, Trump himself saw his ascendency as “Brexit plus plus plus” – and, for that matter, the rise of populist right wing movements on mainland Europe. It is part of a…
