David Cameron announces his resignation. Daniel Leal-Olivas / Press Association. All rights reserved.The referendum was lost some time ago. At its most superficial it was lost because the EU failed to give Cameron enough to take back from the negotiating table in the form of plausible and sustainable gains for the UK in the EU. It was lost because Labour leadership catastrophically failed to join a unified platform until the last few days of the campaign and failed to communicate to its electorate a coherent and plausible narrative of the EU and its future. It was lost because of the years of austerity policies championed by Cameron and Osborne which have left people’s living standards suppressed and many marginalised.
It was lost because it became a referendum about immigration and people’s fears, the latter worked on and stirred by right wing politicians from the Conservatives and UKIP, projecting these fears into false utopias of an independent Britain, independently wealthy. And it was lost because these fears of the unknown and the other played into the voting preferences of older generations.
Underneath all of this there are deeper trends which make the referendum appear mere epiphenomena of more structural shifts. The EU has suffered a calamitous disjuncture between its political capacities and its economic and social challenges. While the Euro radically enhanced economic interdependence across Europe, this process outstripped the governing abilities of the European Union in its current form. Caught between the proclamation of Europe and the sectional interests of its leading countries, the EU has staggered from crisis to crisis revealing its deeper structural and democratic fault lines. The EU has been an elite project, with key decisions taken behind closed doors between its leading powers, and all too often at a vast distance from European peoples, who have felt aggrieved, alienated, and disconnected.
