Brexit: Why Britain’s Existential Crisis Matters To Canada

In case you are blissfully unaware, Britain is in the middle of a heated existential crisis over whether or not it should stay in the European Union. As a Canadian, following the Brexit debate is more or less like discovering your mom isn't handling her empty-nest syndrome very well and won't stop posting pictures of the Queen and/or racist memes on Facebook about the Turks.

But what is even happening in this foggy island country on the other side of the Atlantic? Let's take it from the top.

Since it joined the European Economic Community in 1973 (the EU's purely economic predecessor), no Briton has been thrilled with the country's membership in the continental common market. Traditionally, Euroscepticism was the terrain of the left, with dissident Labour ministers campaigning against the EEC in the first British membership referendum back in 1975. But when the 1992 Maastricht Treaty transformed the common market into a properly political union (with a European parliament and a supranational bureaucracy and all that other fun stuff), right-wing protest parties started popping up on the island, calling for a referendum on membership.

The loudest of these, the libertarian-leaning United Kingdom Independence Party, has been pulling progressively higher vote shares since its formation in the early 1990s. This has culminated in UKIP pulling 27.5 percent of the vote in the 2014 European election and winning a seat in the British parliament in 2015.

Anyways. Because UK Prime Minister and an (alleged) pigdiddler-in-chief David Cameron is not very good at politics (so much as the Labour Party is bad at politics), he made a pact with the devil during his 2010-2015 minority government by promising the Eurosceptic fringe that he'd hold a referendum on the country's EU membership if he was re-elected in 2015. So, here we are.

Of course, the 2016 referendum isn't really about high-minded questions of transnational financial structures or the Continental monetary apparatus or even the basic definition of "the European project." It is, in effect, a referendum on immigration and how white people in the UK feel about minorities. This is not all that different from the last Canadian election, actually, except the stakes in that election were significantly lower (it's Canada, who cares) and Stephen Harper wanted to set up a xenophobia hotline.

Brexit is a plebiscite on British racism led by a ghastly hodgepodge of boorish aristocrats (who is Boris Johnson but a less crack-addled Rob Ford?), crypto-fascists and a weird, undying fantasy of British empire. Aside from the ten unreconstructed English Trotskyites who think rejecting the EU is Phase 1 of world revolution, the case for the "Leave" side boils down to creating jobs (because there will be no more immigrants to steal them) and saving the government money (because there will be no more immigrants to commit welfare fraud). Who, exactly, does UKIP leader Nigel Farage propose to "take our country back" from? Bureaucrats in Brussels? Or the black and brown bodies that have made London one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the history of Earth?

Not that the "Remain" side is much better. Most of the pro-EU arguments are less about the grand, cosmopolitan vision of the European project and more about how Brexit would upset our international corporate overlords and rouse the wrath of Mammon. You can't really call this inspiring but, hey—given a choice between financial fear and racist anger, the former is the better option.

Christ, 21st century politics is depressing.

The whole carnival would be absurd to the point of hilarity if the steady diet of racist bullshit in the tabloid press hadn't gotten Labour MP Jo Cox assassinated in the street by a man who gave his name in court as "death to traitors, freedom for Britain."

So, this all sounds pretty dire. But why should Canadians care about Britain's weird national neuroses?

Put simply: because the UK's crisis of conscience is not an isolated incident.

The national madness whipped up by the pro-Brexit camp is the peculiarly British iteration of the wave of reaction crashing across Europe right now. It's the English strain of the political disease threatening to gobble up the American republic in November. It's the same subset of folks who give pageviews to The Rebel whenever they upload a new article about how Muslims are here to rape children. And it's going to colour a large swathe of our politics for years to come.

It bears repeating that the European Union is wildly—maybe irrevocably—dysfunctional. It's a neoliberal nightmare more suited to letting Belgian bureaucrats play out petty Napoleon complexes and whipping the poor with austerity measures than it is to building a genuinely democratic multinational community. But Brexit isn't the answer, because it would only empower a (different) small clique of oligarchs to bleed the country dry as they're cheered on by a legion of frothing proto-fascists.

Geography notwithstanding, Britain is not an island. If the UK leaves the EU now, it could trigger a larger existential crisis—and broader collapse—at a time when right-wing extremism is surging across the continent. Marine Le Pen and the Front Nationale are on the march in France and the Austrian Freedom Party came within a hair's breadth of taking control of the country in the spring presidential election. "Fortress Europe" has done woefully little to stop thousands of migrants and refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean, but would a patchwork-quilt of national-chauvinists really do any better?

Anyway, it's all out of my hands, and God knows Canada has enough of its own problems without worrying about Prime Minister Boris fucking Johnson and a nation of weaponized soccer hooligans. Maybe we'll get lucky and the European project will live to see another day. But in the event that the British do decide to blow up Europe, those political ripples may yet swamp us on this side of the pond, the first wave of a new tide of fear, rage, and white supremacy that threatens to surge across the Atlantic in 2016.

Follow Drew Brown on Twitter.