Or perhaps, more ominously: “Farage and his supporters see Brexit as the cloak to disguise their real ambitions to change our country, our culture and our future. He has aligned himself to people at the heart of the populist movements in the US and across Europe, which are set on putting a torch to the old order and its institutions, infrastructure and politics. Out of that chaos he wants to see nothing less than a survivalist economy, a world of rich asset-strippers, rights and equality opposers and climate deniers.”
Views: 45
A fascinating question what “the old order” is in the UK. The above quote suggests that the Guardian is thinking of the social-democratic system that existed between WW II and Thatcher. A lot of the Brexiteers seem to be dreaming of something pre-1924 (first Labour Prime Minister), probably more like 1850, when Britain had a substantial fraction of humanity under its bootheel and capitalism was fairly red in tooth and claw in the cities and the countryside was feudal.
In any case, there’s a long history of democratically-elected governments with markedly xenophobic ethnic policies. I recently ran into a book review that claimed that in the Americas, democratic governments have generally been more ethnically restrictive in their immigration policies than non-democratic governments. Certainly there’s nothing in Europe today to suggest that it hurts your public appeal to deny a universalistic attitude toward human rights or to turn away from a global-environmental sensibility.