A man watches anti-fascist protesters at the British National Party's Red, White and Blue festival in Codnor, Derbyshire, in 2009. Rui Vieira/Press Association. All rights reserved.
The recent momentous decision by the majority of the voting UK population to leave the EU was shocking, but, in retrospect, not surprising. It is now glaringly obvious that too many people for too long have been without prospects, without education and without hope. For these people, the benefits of the EU – including the possibility to live and work in one of 27 countries, or the many jobs it funded, were simply never considered as relevant or accessible to them. The imagined disadvantages however – of too many immigrants, and EU bureaucracy – were shouted out to them daily for more than a decade through the populist mainstream media, and legitimised more recently by opportunist mainstream politicians anxious to seem in touch with their concerns.
Indeed Brexit is just a moment on a journey which arguably began after the terrorist attacks in New York on 9/11 and London on 7/7. This is when historical dichotomies of east vs west and narratives of anti-Islam were energetically revived, quickly evolving into anti-anyone-who-looks-Muslim as we saw with the mistaken killing of the Brazilian Jean DeMenezes on the London underground. The global financial crash and acceleration of austerity measures in the UK offered the perfect storm in which foreigners, asylum seekers and Muslims could all be blamed for ‘taking all the jobs and all the houses’.
