vrijdag 24 juni 2016

Post-Imperial Stress Disorder


Joris Juyedijk wijst via twitter (quote: This is the best I've read about the referendum) op een zeer interessant artikel in de Boston Globe van Andrew Brown. Must read! Hear, hear:

'As the Suez adventure made clear, we can now fight wars only with American permission or as American clients. We can no longer dictate trade terms to our partners but must submit to the whims of foreign bureaucracies. Ever-increasing amounts of the country’s infrastructure is owned by foreigners and operated for their benefit. The same is true of our capital city, where the housing market is now insane. All these things are blamed, not on globalization, and still less on the Americans, but on “Brussels,” which has come to stand for the unspeakable unfairness of a world which no longer operates, as it did for several centuries, to the benefit of the English people. ' [..]

The Leavers are mostly those who lost out from what Mrs Thatcher did but drew nourishment by what she said. So they felt doubly betrayed in the post-Blair era, when the economics of the new order went on hurting them, and the rhetoric turned against them, too.

But the Leavers are not a homogenous group. Take away their English nationalism, and they fall into two profoundly opposed groups. By far the largest are the foot soldiers, small-c conservative and genuinely hostile to immigrants of every sort. (More than half the immigrants in this country are from outside the European Union.) The ordinary Leavers are found almost everywhere outside London, in all the places where globalization has devastated the economy and where many of the jobs that are left have gone to foreigners.

They are nourished by the extraordinary and unremitting hostility to “Migrants” in some parts of the press. The Daily Express, a traditionally patriotic tabloid now owned by the pornographer Richard Desmond, has run 37 front page splashes warning about migrants this year alone.'
 etc... 

Read on: England’s post-imperial stress disorder
 @ Boston Globe

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