I've been blogging long enough to honor 10-year anniversaries like Brexit.
What I wrote back then:
It was supposed to be a throwaway moment: it was something Prime Minister Cameron promised to do last year during the Parliamentary elections as a way to keep voters from bolting to the anti-EU, anti-immigrant UKIP (aka British Trumpshirts) during a potentially tight run. The expectations - and the polling - kept pointing to a tough but clean win to Remain with the EU, because honestly most of the elites in politics and the media believed the voters wouldn't be stupid enough to commit economic suicide.
And then they counted the votes...
The British Pound dropped to a 30-year low compared to the US dollar. In about an hour it dropped faster than a blue whale without a parachute.
To say that the global markets went into panic mode AT THAT MOMENT and remained so well into today would be an understatement.
And so here I was, sitting at home watching all of this on an Internet I swore I wasn't going to pay attention to, and this was pretty much the one thought bouncing through my head:
YOU TOSSERS! YOU HAD ONE JOB!
You Brits could have retained some stability in all three major areas of public concern: your economy, your culture, your government. All three are now burning in the dumpster fire...
Prime Minister David Cameron went in one hour from being one of the most powerful men on the planet - Prime Minister ranks somewhere below President of the United States and slightly above t.e Actor Currently Playing The Doctor - to resigning from office in utter humiliation. Few Prime Ministers fell so low so fast. The resulting battle among Conservatives for the new leadership spot will likely spill over into a broken government, forcing a new round of elections sooner than the required five-year cycle...
Ten years on, we can see it got worse than that for the Tories: a revolving door of PMs - Teresa May who resigned in disgrace, to Boris Johnson who resigned in humiliating disgrace, to Liz Truss who resigned in utter humiliating disgrace, to Rishi Sunak who oversaw the Conservatives' worst electoral defeat since the 19th Century - as none of them could figure out a smooth exit from the European Union even if they wanted to (and in Boris' case, he eagerly pushed Britain out the airlock).
Brexit as an economic fiasco for the UK is so deep a problem that the Labour Party taking over in 2024 still hasn't figured out their own solutions for it, and became one of several factors in the recent resignation of their Prime Minister Keir Starmer just yesterday.
During my write-up for that article, I didn't have much to say about Brexit's effects as most of the coverage on Starmer's imminent departure focused on other woes. However, I did refer to an article from The Atlantic, a deep dive into the aftermath of Brexit and how it's sunk the UK's economy to the level of... well, the state of Mississippi (article by Idrees Kahloon):
Who broke Britain? Someone—or something—must have. The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.
But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London...
One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one...
Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones...
The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.
In fairness, the 2008 financial crisis hit Britain especially hard. In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.
But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.
The promised growth did not materialize, and austerity left scars that linger still...
Conservatives, if one looks back to moments like the Great Depression, do not buy into Keynesian policies. The problem is, even when their austerity measures clearly falter they refuse to change tactics, and instead double-down on the blame-shifting.
Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending...
I recommend you go and read Kahloon's article in full, because he goes into a lot more detail about the decline of industry in the more remote parts of England - everything outside of London - as well as the rise of Farage's latest political farce Reform (he abandoned UKIP when it got too overtly racist) even as much of the Brexit destruction is due to Farage's efforts.
So how does this all relate to Mississippi?
If you don't know, Mississippi is one of the poorest and most broken-down states in the Union. The roads and bridges are some of the worst in terms of safety and condition. Half the state suffers from sustained poverty for longer than 20 years. It's in the bottom five of worst states to live in.
A good example is the condition of the state's own capital Jackson, where infrastructure has broken down completely and there's no clean water (via Drew Costley and Emily Wagster Pettus with AP News, published through PBS Newshour):
But the crisis in the city of Jackson isn't over, even if its boil-water advisory was lifted on Thursday (in 2022). While the state plans to stop handing out free bottled water at sites around the city Saturday night, the city said water pressure still hasn't been fully restored, and state health officials said lead in some pipes remains so worrisome that pregnant women and young children should still use bottled water...
Other residents told The Associated Press on Friday that their water remains too discolored to count on, so now they'll have to rely on water distribution by community-run charities or buy water again themselves, adding insult to injury.
Jackson had already been under a state health department boil-water notice for a month when torrential rain fell in August, flooding the Pearl River and overwhelming the treatment system. Water pressure abruptly dropped, emptying faucets for days.
How did this happen? Residents, politicians, experts and activists say systemic racism is the root cause.
Jackson's population has declined since 1980, a decade after the city's schools began integrating. Many white families left for the suburbs, leaving less revenue to maintain the infrastructure. Middle class Black people then moved out to escape urban decay and rising crime. State and federal spending never made up the difference.
"The legacy of racial zoning, segregation, legalized redlining have ultimately led to the isolation, separation and sequestration of racial minorities into communities (with) diminished tax bases, which has had consequences for the built environment, including infrastructure," said Marccus Hendricks, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland.
Heather McTeer Toney worked to clean up discolored tap water as mayor of Greenville, Mississippi, before serving as the Environmental Protection Agency's southeast regional administrator from 2014 to 2017. Now she works on environmental justice issues nationwide for the Environmental Defense Fund. She said many majority-minority communities lack consistent access to clean water.
"Any community that is suffering from lack of infrastructure maintenance is dealing with the same problem, maybe just on a different scale," Toney said. "But across the nation, with .... poor communities that are often Black, brown, Indigenous and on the frontlines of the climate crisis, we see the same thing happening over and over again."
There have been studies over the decades highlighting how pervasive racism is when it comes to dealing with poverty, improving living standards, and community developments. I can't find it now, but one of my coworkers at the North Regional Library back in the 1990s showed me a survey where they polled white folks asking if they preferred taking a five percent pay increase if it meant blacks would get a two percent increase, or taking a two percent pay cut if it meant blacks would get a five percent pay cut... and a majority of whites went with the pay cut. I'd love to find the source for that again, because it highlights the viciousness and irrationality of racism: Under normal rules of economic theory, everyone would take the pay increase; but because of racism, whites will take the pay cut if it means blacks get it worse.
The racism holding down Mississippi is now the racism holding down the United Kingdom, and it was recognized even as the Brexit vote blew up everything (via Leah Donnella at NPR):
So why did the U.K. vote for something so politically and economically disruptive? Some say race has a lot to do with it — specifically, the racial tension that has resulted from the U.K.'s recently welcoming in record numbers of immigrants. In 2015, 630,000 foreign national migrants came to the U.K. from both inside and outside the EU. This year, the U.K. has ushered in an additional 333,000.
The campaign to get the U.K. to leave the EU (also known as the "Leave" campaign) was spearheaded by the right-wing, populist UK Independence Party, or UKIP. The party, led by Member in the European Parliament Nigel Farage, says that the EU "means the end of the UK as an independent, self-governing nation with its own government and its own borders."
For months, UKIP has fought for the United Kingdom's independence from the EU — some say by capitalizing on racially charged animus toward immigrants. In the Washington Post, writer Anyusha Rose points to the Leave campaign as evidence that in the U.K., "racism is no longer racism — it's legitimate opinion."
By 2019, the effects of racism in the Brexit decision were more clear (via the BBC):
Racism and race-related hate crime has increased since the 2016 Brexit referendum, with officers appointed to deal with resultant "tensions".
Three of the four Welsh police forces reported rises in the last five years, figures released to the BBC show.
Eryl Jones, from charity Show Racism the Red Card, said he believed Brexit had been a "major influence".
It comes as 24 community cohesion officers are being appointed by councils across Wales...
"Incidents of racism have gone up throughout the UK as well as in Wales since the campaign to leave the EU, " Mr Jones said.
"It's fairly obvious that Brexit has been a major influence..."
Home Office figures show hate crimes in England and Wales rising over the past five years - with a spike, it says, since 2016...
It's a simple equation: The racism spurs more poverty, and the poverty spurs more racism.
The only way the UK can break the cycle - to avoid the fate of Mississippi, which devolved into one of the poorest states as far back as the American Civil War, and which fought with gun and noose for decades to keep itself poor and racist - is to wake up to the horrors that anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence inflicts upon themselves, recognize where poverty is at its worst and spend like hell to undo the damage it leaves on families across the board, and look at rejoining their neighboring nations in an economic deal that would reinvigorate their dying industries at home.
Don't end up like Mississippi. Don't end up the trashy trailer park of nations on the European continent.
