Image: Banksy, Dover (2017). WikiMedia/Creative Commons license.
How do you analyse a moment, which was part of a process that is about everything, but was reduced to a yes – no decision? The EU referendum vote was both a mass participatory and mass exclusionary moment. This vote, and Brexit as a whole, can be described as a polarising conflict of marginalisations. The conflict exposed by the EU referendum constitutes an important point of entry into addressing the unmet needs and enabling the de-marginalisation of people who have been living violent marginalisation for generations.
Following the vote, there was a 100% rise in racist incidents. One in five BAME people in the UK reported being racially abused. This is in a context of police impunity for over 1,500 deaths in custody since 1990 within which BME people are over-represented, and with black people in the UK three times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts, and 44 times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act. Negotiating Brexit cannot be understood as a technical, economic process alone but one of navigating and overcoming the lived experiences of oppression in the UK.
