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The vox pops in my social media feed on 31 January sent a shiver down the spine. There were comments on getting back \u201cour freedom\u201d (that we never lost), \u201cour independence\u201d (that we never lost), our \u201csovereignty\u201d (that we never lost), our \u201cdemocracy\u201d (that we never lost) and \u201cour industry\u201d (that we have lost, but not because of the EU).<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a heady mix. On social media people were quick to lampoon these positions \u2014 with good reason \u2014 but people are believing them.<\/p>\n
The brutal reality is that these positions show the depth of the failure thinking that has accompanied Brexit. We can\u2019t get back what we never lost. But globalisation is changing the world radically. The real loss of sovereignty and the real limit on what governments can do is nothing to do with the EU, but does come from increased global connectedness.
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A glaring example is that some people blamed Gordon Brown for the financial crash of 2008 but they were wrong \u2014 this was a global crash, so the debate about Labour\u2019s performance around then should have focussed on how well they had prepared the economy to withstand a shock from outside. At the time Labour were attacked for the crash itself, showing how hard people are finding it to think more broadly. It\u2019s much easier to have a mental model of one\u2019s country than of the world, but thinking just in terms of the country because one can\u2019t think of the world is like deciding what to where to go out on the basis of the temperature indoors rather than the snow outside. <\/p>\n
Waving union jacks doesn\u2019t change anything. Withdrawing from a major and stable European arrangement actually leaves us more vulnerable.<\/p>\n
A harsh side of globalisation is that industry has indeed moved. Mass production has gone to countries with lower wages. How many of the people who lament that would be willing to pay two or three times as much for their clothes if they were made in Birmingham rather than Bangladesh? More sharply, the sort of trade barriers that would protect the British economy are things that appeal to populists, but harm the economy in the long term. The fundamental point is that globalisation is almost unstoppable. Resources poured into the illusion of stopping it are resources taken from other things. <\/p>\n
Like Donald Trump\u2019s \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d hats, with \u201cmade in China\u201d tags inside, the fantasy of stopping globalisation doesn\u2019t match reality.<\/p>\n
All of that is obvious. There is something going on which means a great swathe of the country is not seeing it. <\/p>\n
One of Lacan\u2019s really helpful insights is that we use language to think about things. In a sense that is obvious, but it dangles a more subtle question about what we can\u2019t symbolise \u2014 like the person who feels angry and lashes out at someone, even though the person at whom they lash out had nothing to do with their being angry. (In brackets \u2014 in that situation people are often good at intuiting situations where they can throw their anger at someone without destroying them, as when a child processes its anger by shouting at its parents, knowing it can do this. How much of the anger Brexiteers have been directing at the EU has nothing to do with the EU, but is being thrown in that direction because the EU is seen as stable-enough to take it?)<\/p>\n
When language is working, we have the ability to symbolise things and think about them in very rich ways. But processing raw emotion through to something that can actually be thought is a big achievement. It can\u2019t be taken for granted, especially in situations of rapid change when familiar understandings no longer work. People living in countries with colonies, who are used to thinking dismissively of \u201cthe natives\u201d, don\u2019t easily recognise the wisdom of the people they are dismissing \u2014 it is often easier simply to deny reality and make up an alternative way to make sense of what they are seeing. In the UK there\u2019s been remarkably little coverage of the fact that the Indian economy has overtaken the British one in importance. It\u2019s even harder for people to recognise the richness of the culture our forebears disparaged. One way to processes this is as fear of immigrants coming to \u201ctake what we have\u201d \u2014 but in the background there should be the gnawing realisation that things are turning the other way around. The only thing that is likely to challenge that is serious damage from climate change \u2014 which gives a sense of why some people might have an unconscious reason to ignore that unfolding crisis.<\/p>\n
India is an example, rather than the only piece of reality people have a reason to ignore. A nostalgic attempt to turn back the clock is emotionally easier than engaging with reality. We never lost our \u201cfreedom\u201d or \u201cdemocracy\u201d because of the EU, but both could easily be threatened by global change. The EU has been pretty realistic about this \u2014 unfortunately, I fear that Brexiteers hear that not as friends helping us face reality, but as an unwelcome reminder of it.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s generally recognised that the Leave campaign lied on an industrial scale. The claim that \u201cboth sides lied\u201d is a false equivalence \u2014 is a mix of asserting that the economic predictions for what will happen if\/when we leave the Single Market and Customs Union have not come true (because we haven\u2019t left them) and that the emergency budget George Osborne said would be needed didn\u2019t happen (except that the changes made by his successor and the Bank of England are that in all but name).<\/p>\n