The Real Tragedy of Brexit

It is time to confront some uncomfortable truths about Britain's exit from the EU, writes Hardeep Matharu, introducing our forthcoming print edition

Byline Times’ founding mission is ‘what the papers don’t say’. So, over the past three years, investigating the consequences of Britain’s hard exit from the EU has been one of our key focuses. This has especially been the case since our politicians and established press are still maintaining that it has been a success – despite all the evidence to the contrary, particularly on the economy – or accepting that it is “done” and the country has moved on. Complicity and fear trap them from the truth about what the most significant change to our constitutional settlement in modern times has meant for this country’s people. And if they are reluctant to even mention it, there is next to no hope for a deeper understanding of why people voted to leave the EU – and the price those same people are now paying. 

But this is where the deeper, darker story lies.

‘Culture wars’ are now regularly referenced in our public discourse but, in many ways, Brexit heralded in Britain the US-style polarisation around issues along identity lines. That the remain campaign never saw it as a project of identity and anti-establishment populism was part of the problem. But the leave campaign’s weaponising of division, the feeding of people’s darker instincts with xenophobic rhetoric, and harking back to a time when Britain was ‘great’ and it ‘stood alone’, was exactly that.  

Engaging in these culture wars rarely seems like the answer. But interventions of truth can be a way to cut through them. This is why Byline TV – this newspaper’s documentary arm – has been on the road for the past three years meeting people around the country affected by Brexit. Many of them voted to leave the EU and, by uncovering the reality of why this was and the impact it has had on their livelihoods, we can shed new light that the silence, continued polarisation, and simplistic ‘leave versus remain’ narratives cannot. 

Excerpts from December’s edition of Byline Times

But we found that the impact was not just material. What happens when the jobs people prided themselves on for years are changed utterly overnight? How do they deal with the psychological betrayal that their problems have been made worse not better by the politicians who said they understood? Where does stability and recognition for them lie, as people, in an increasingly unequal society in an era of – as sociologist Zygmunt Bauman termed it – “liquid modernity”?

The lies told by the likes of Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage haven’t only deeply affected those who voted to leave and are now (literally) suffering the consequences. I believe the lies are why those who voted to remain find it so difficult to accept the result. 

I have always felt that, in a democracy, if the referendum had been held in a fair and transparent way, for the right reasons, with clear terms of reference, and with campaigns rooted in honesty and information, and a majority still voted to leave the EU, and if that exit was driven by the desire to make a success of it and not to harm the country, then those who didn’t vote for it would have more reason to at least understand it – even if they couldn’t ever fully accept it.

The EU Referendum was none of these things. Both the leave and remain campaigns, to varying degrees, failed the country. This is why so many of those who voted to stick with the EU struggle to accept the act of self-harm that it is. 

But the lies are only a part of the story.

While I voted to remain in the EU, my parents both voted to leave. In the months that followed, there was an instinct to judge and get angry but, more than that, since I respect my parents as people, I wanted to understand. So I wrote about their motivations for voting for Brexit, and those of other Asian immigrants, in an eye-opening analysis many readers found genuinely illuminating. For it was not merely a story of Brexit, but of Empire; of Britain’s identity; its role; its future and its past – and of the part politics now plays as an outlet for people’s more psychological and personal needs, whether we like this or not.

In the same way, Caolan Robertson and George Llewelyn have sought to understand the leave voters they met. Does this immediately make anything better? Perhaps not. But sometimes it’s the only starting point we have.

Until we delve deeper, we will remain an island adrift.