After a decade, Brexit’s cost to Britain is not only economic
Hateful discourse in politics and society has become a regular feature since the UK voted to abandon the EU. London, United Kingdom – Ten years
Hateful discourse in politics and society has become a regular feature since the UK voted to abandon the EU. London, United Kingdom – Ten years after Britons voted in the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union, opinion polls show the public is still grappling with the consequences of its decision. As Keir Starmer resigns to make way for the seventh British prime minister in a decade, the current political instability has its roots in the ominous spiral that Brexit unleashed with David Cameron’s resignation following the referendum in 2016. A YouGov survey conducted this month to mark the referendum’s 10th anniversary found that just 30 percent of Britons now believe leaving the EU was the right choice. This figure was 64 percent when the vote was held on June 23, 2016. But now, a clear majority of 57 percent think it was wrong to leave the bloc, and six in 10 judge Brexit as an outright failure. The arguments for a yes vote that consumed the referendum campaign – sovereignty, the British pound, economic independence, austerity and smashing the burden of unnecessary red tape – have settled into something closer to a deadlock than a consensus. Yet with a recent analysis by the Bank of England indicating the UK economy has shrunk by 6 percent due to the effects of the departure, it is no longer disputed among many economists that the honeymoon is over. Brexit has morphed into “Bregret”, as some pollsters and commentators have quipped. However, the lasting legacy of Brexit may prove not economic but societal – a slow reshaping of the country’s political culture, its tolerance for extremity and the discourse about who belongs, who should be an outsider and how to exclude, no matter how toxic the polarisation gets. On such measures, the decade since the referendum has been costly. A toxic culture of antipathy Anxieties and racism in Britain around immigration, especially concerning people of colour, have a long history. The Brexit referendum offered the latest licence for exclusionary attitudes. By turning a complex question of EU membership into a vote on control of the borders, pro-Brexit campaigners infused the politics of migration with a moral charge it has gripped onto firmly.
According to Tahir Abbas, the director of the Centre on Radicalisation, Inclusion and Social Equity at Aston University, “Brexit was a long-term process” that emerged from decades of euroscepticism within the Conservative Party. What is increasingly evident, however, is the powerful rallying of opinion and people that Brexit achieved, he said. “Brexit is a much more recent phenomenon that mobilised Islamophobia, particularly through the infamous poster that Nigel Farage stood before, showing pictures of tens of thousands of brown-skinned people seemingly making their way across Europe and into the UK,” Abbas told Al Jazeera. Now, the rhetoric that once sat at the fringe – that the country is being “invaded”, that asylum is a racket, that minorities such as Muslims do not share “British values” – has moved steadily towards the centre of acceptable debate. Phrases that would once have ended a minister’s career in government have increasingly been normalised. With the rhetoric has come policy. Successive governments, chasing the electorate that Brexit revealed, have competed to out-toughen one another on immigration: offshore processing, the threat to leave the European Convention on Human Rights and schemes to deport asylum seekers to third countries that courts have found unlawful. Measures once regarded as unacceptable – such as detention of migrants and asylum seekers without defined limits, the criminalisation of rescue operations at sea and the rhetorical conflation of refugees with criminals – have been normalised under the guise of border control. Phrases such as “Stop the Boats”, a slogan of the Conservative Party to demonstrate its anti-immigration credentials, have been elevated by leaders of the far right, like Tommy Robinson, who enjoys the endorsement of trillionaire Elon Musk. “Enough is enough. … Stop the invasion” was a crowd chant at the “United the Kingdom” march in London, led by Robinson in September. Slogans such as “protecting our women and children” have been regularised to infer that sexual crimes targeting women and children are somehow the domain of brown and Black people, “the foreign invaders”. From discourse to violence on the street A week before the referendum, a 53-year-old man killed Jo Cox, a Labour Party legislator and mother of two, in northern England.
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