> At best, the jury is still out. We will be able to consider the question rationally in, perhaps, a decade.

You should have stopped there because that is the most rational conclusion to this whole thing.

But regarding the racism part: if you haven't noticed, the entire west is having a massive surge in racist ideologies. IMO it is one of two things, either a) it is not racism but classified as such by the left, or b) it is racism and the reason for its massive surge in the past few years are the current policies in place. In both of these scenarios, a change is required. Is Brexit that much needed change? I don't know. But what I do know is that leaving the EU is not as suicidal as people make it sound to be.

> a) it is not racism but classified as such by the left

Then what would you call it?

Racism has been growing across the west in line with discussion of immigrants and refugees. The last two months, and especially since result, has seen a change in the UK I cannot explain by other means. It's more than just immigrants at Calais, or Poles and Latvians - all of that has been there a decade or more without people being quite so blatant about it. Something has changed. If not brexit and the campaign how else do you explain the last two months? For heaven's sake there's a huge amount of incidents along the lines "you lost, get out" which is highly indicative of mindset, no?

> But what I do know is that leaving the EU is not as suicidal as people make it sound to be.

I happen to agree, even though I was in favour of remain. However, this particular means of leaving the EU, at this time, in this way seems to have higher than evens chance of poor outcome.

What do I mean by that?

The first exit by any nation is likely to receive poorer terms than they might expect in any subsequent trade negotions, "pour encourager les autres".

In lacking any plan, team or responsibility for the outcome we are even less likely to get good deals. Both sides should have been planning, the FO should have been using our alleged diplomatic skills to start forming plans and allies. Start thinking about trade missions and so forth.

Selling brexit by means of a series of lies has split the country (cf 350m a week to the NHS with Farage and Boris the morning after result) in a way that was near unthinkable.

So no, leaving the EU need not be anywhere near as suicidal as people make it out to be, but leaving the EU in such a clumsy, ill-prepared and scare driven, manner could easily be.

> The first exit by any nation is likely to receive poorer terms than they might expect in any subsequent trade negotions, "pour encourager les autres".

Absolutely. But someone has to be the first. Could/should it have been someone else? absolutely, but that's just how things unfolded.

> In lacking any plan, team or responsibility for the outcome we are even less likely to get good deals.

Couldn't agree more. I just think that the anti-EU themselves did not believe it would happen so fast.

I find the media, here and in the UK, have become more accepting of racism. Encouraging it. Against blacks and mexicans and muslims here, and against polish and refugees there.

This creates an aura of conformity as viewers and readers nod to the views of their favorite talkers eventually absorbing them into their own.

The ultimate effect of this can be seen in the Rwandan genocide. It was the radio that made people do it in that case.

I happen to think the parent is quite right, but that I would go further and say that Brexit is definitely bat-shit insane. The UK has now pissed off the EU who will NOT be giving the UK favourable terms to leave the EU. Scotland will succeed and NI... well who knows what will happen there.

And don't try and minimise the outbreak of racism in the UK as if it's "happening everywhere". It's not happening here in NZ. And when people are being abused by yobos specifically referencing the Brexit vote, it makes your argument patently false and frankly, disgusting.

I've followed the arguments for and against and it's pretty clear that the biggest common denominator in the Leave argument is "It's the immagrunts, innit?".

I will give you that Brexit is not literally "suicidal" but economically it will be close and it terms of the UK's image to the rest of the world - the damage there is already done. You look like a bunch of racist, impetuous, sulky, ill-informed yobos blaming the world's victims for the acts of the very people you voted into office.

"UK's image to the rest of the world"

British tourists have already ruined it.

For anybody who is consistently anti-imperialist, Scotland breaking of UK is just cherry on top of the cake.

While xenophobia may be the most important factor of the referendum's outcome, it should not be forgotten that a good part of Labor was never too hot on the EU either. Many people on the left regard the EU as a bastion of neoliberalism where a shadowy army of 30,000 lobbyists do a great job at defending the interest of big money. The lackluster performance of Labor during the campaign certainly did not help the remain vote.

> the damage there is already done. You look like a bunch of racist, impetuous, sulky, ill-informed yobos blaming the world's victims for the acts of the very people you voted into office.

So lets see, which is more likely?

a) It just so happened that France, Sweden, Norway, UK and a bunch of other countries turned racist over night (see the rise in numbers of voters for the extreme right parties), or

b) you are wrong because you have an incomplete picture of how the world actually looks like?

I'll let you decide which one it is.

I am claiming that economic hardship coupled with a ready scapegoat at hand leads to scapegoating. Are you claiming that this has never happened before in the world? I'm pretty sure if I try REALLLY hard, I might even be able to think of an example or two in European history.

You have to be pretty ignorant of history if you can't find parallels with Irish, Jews or Blacks and different times and places. And YES I am saying that just as in history when all those groups were demonised, this current bout in Europe is racist.

I think its a bit of both regarding the racism thing.

I have seen pretty nasty stuff posted (second hand) on my facebook about Polish people go home and the like since the result. On the other hand when you question open door policies and what we are going to do with the immigrants arriving, many of the intolerant left shout you down as being racist.

Just have a look at these statistics: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/... (2014 data) http://www.statista.com/statistics/459815/accepted-asylum-ap...

UK is NOT the number one immigration country and did take NO responsibilities during the ongoing European immigration crisis.

you don't have to be number one in order for conflict emerge. That is something leftists don't seem to understand. I would argue that when a society's homogeneity is in question, the social "survival mechanism" kicks in.

In other words, my argument is that in order to maintain internal peace, a society needs to be mostly homogeneous. Multi-cultural societies throughout history have always had major racism and other form of group-oppression. Traditionally, in order to maintain internal peace societies have exported that conflict in order to rally the citizens around the flag (example of this would be the US).

I might be wrong about this but I have never heard, read about or seen a single multi-cultural society that have managed to remain in peace for too long. The only exception to that are societies that are ruled by dictators with an iron fist (ex. Syria prior to the war). Groups did co-exist peacefully but they had to be forced to do so.

The most multi-cultural areas of Britain voted to remain i.e. cities and university towns.

The areas that voted leave seem to demonstrate xenophobia in its fundamental form: fear of the other.

Leave voters clearly are not all racist. Unfortunately, though, a vocal racist minority has taken the referendum result as validating their views.

Racism should absolutely be called out where it exists.

Your argument that homogeneity invoked a social survival instinct needs strong references, otherwise it sounds like hand-waving legitimising of xenophobia. We're smarter than that.

There has to be some reason for Xenophobia. Plain "stupidity" might allow it, but doesn't explain it completely. This is global phenomena that has occurred over and over again for at least two millennia across all cultures.

What do you think explains it?

There is always a reason. There's always a neural correlate, a psycho-social construct, a genetic component, an environmental variable.

Of course there is.

It would be truly astonishing if there wasn't.

Finding it might prove hard, though. And anyway, so what? If we did find those neural correlates and genetic components we'd... do what, exactly? Invent a pill, a therapy?

In the meantime, we can rationalise simply that xenophobia is destructive, and we can determine effective interventions.

Should we tackle what our understanding currently allows, rather than waiting to uncover an explanation?

Legal racism has been dealt with and schools teach students that racism is bad all over the west. Apparently this is not enough as there is this fuss about racism in the western world.

If we go further fighting racism, what are those effective interventions? Can we even trust that current relatively good situation will continue? Is there any way to reliably export western anti-racism?

Racism is passed from parent to child. Taught. It isn't a phenomena, nor can a school cirriculum undo what is taught at home.

So the only thing we can anymore effectively do to racism is to take children to foster care?

Alternatively we just accept the current levels. Maybe express disappointment on Facebook.

Same reasons the Jews were blamed when Germany was economically and spiritually crushed by the Treaty of Versailles.

Scapegoat? (Ironically term with Jewish origin.)

If this scapegoating phenomena is somehow built in feature of human beings, what/who would be the healthiest possible target for it?

If it's not built in feature, how can it be eradicated?

> The most multi-cultural areas of Britain voted to remain i.e. cities and university towns... The areas that voted leave seem to demonstrate xenophobia in its fundamental form: fear of the other.

This is why I can't take the leftist arguments seriously. You refute phenomenon that have been taking place for thousands of years in order to glorify an ideology that you believe in without a single shred of evidence...

If you think that the fact that certain cities voted X compared to others who voted Y describes the sudden rise of nationalism across all of Europe AT THE SAME TIME, then you sir are in for a ride.

If by "you" you mean me, this has become rather personal.

I didn't claim to be "leftist". I'm not "glorifying" anything. I'm not sure what you think I'm "refuting".

If by "refute phenomenon (sic) that have been taking place for thousands of years" you mean "racism" I'm not refuting the fact that it exists, what a strange claim that would be. I don't really follow what you're saying here at all.

I certainly didn't claim that Brexit voting patterns describe (do you mean explain?) the rise of pan-European nationalism. So again I don't follow what you're saying here.

In fact, I believe quite the reverse direction of influence: that the rise in pan-European nationalism influenced a vocal minority of the vote who now feel legitamised.

I suspect that the rise in pan-European nationalism is due to people being worried about recession, austerity, crumbling national institutions, etc etc. and immigration has become a surrogate for that: There's only so much cash in the coffers; there aren't enough {houses,schools,hospitals,whatever}; immigrants consume a non-zero fraction of these resources; therefore reducing the number of immigrants will improve the capacity of these services.

The problem being, of course, that you could pick any scapegoat and substitute it into that equation equally well. Consequently, when people do pick immigration as their scapegoat of choice, I consider that xenophobic.

> you don't have to be number one in order for conflict emerge.

But that's what the anti-immigrationists were claiming - that the UK was taking in far too many immigrants and that the country was being flooded with immigrants.

Only about 5% of the population of the UK is an EU immigrant.

EDIT: London voted to remain. London is about 40% immigrant. Multi-culturalism isn't just about immigration, it includes different religions (London has a Muslim mayor) and other stuff, all of which London does pretty well at.

The problem is that immigrants have NOTHING to do with the woes of UK society, they are just a convenient scapegoat. I would argue that the social erosion that accounted for the protest vote of the disaffected was entirely due to the neoliberal program of the government that they themselves elected.

You can't say they have NOTHING to do with it when we have problems with lack of housing and other resources that are stretched.

There are easy fixes to these problems (build more houses), but its silly to say that immigration doesn't contribute to the problem.

I did not use the word immigrants. Not even once. I was talking about homogeneity. A society without immigrants can turn heterogeneous as well. This has nothing to do with immigration, it has to do with cultures and ideas.

So you don't believe that the influx of immigrants into the UK was affecting its homogeneity?

I can't quite see how you can't see that remaining homogenous and accepting immigrants are opposite sides of the very same coin?

Do some digging about Poland in XV century, it was a home of huge amount of peacefully coexisting cultures for few centuries.

New Zealand is a peaceful, multicultural society.

"New Zealand's crime statistics are compounded by the over-representation of Māori. Though Maori make up only 12.5% of the general population aged 15 and over,[28] 42% of all criminal apprehensions involve a person identifying as Maori, as do 50% of those in prison."

No matter how you interpret that, there is something fucked up:

"The figures lend themselves to extremist interpretations: at one end, some accuse the criminal justice system of being brutally racist, as either intentionally or unintentionally destructive to the interests and well-being of Māori as a people. At the other, there are those who dismiss the entire Māori race as constitutionally 'criminally inclined'."

NZ has quadruple incarceration rate compared ton Finland, Japan or Iceland, which you could claim to be homogeneous.

I said NZ was a peaceful society - it is. I said that NZ was multicultural - it is. I didn't claim that we have no racism and I agree with you that the over-representation of Maori in the prison population is a problem. However, it was only the first two claims that I actually made.

Yea so is Sweden, Norway and a ton of other places. FOR NOW... That is the whole point.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass_(disambiguation)

> But regarding the racism part: if you haven't noticed, the entire west is having a massive surge in racist ideologies. IMO it is one of two things, either a) it is not racism but classified as such by the left, or b) it is racism and the reason for its massive surge in the past few years are the current policies in place.

Its dissatisfaction with the distributional effects of the economic system and the lack of mainstream elites in many countries -- of either the left or the right -- even acknowledging, much less addressing, the problem. This creates an opportunity for all kinds of opportunistic demagoguery laying blame for the problem -- doing so based on race and religion is common, but not the only element of this -- to sell policies that have little rational connection to the problems people are having.

Brexit is far from the only example of a policy being sold this way.

The UK had a rise in racist / xenophobic ideology with groups like the English Defence League, Britain First, and the Knights Templar.

Most people recognise those as extreme groups, and don't join them.

But now? There's been a dramatic rise in reporting of racist incidents. Those incidents are not being committed by members of those groups.

This echoes my thoughts.

When I first heard about the referendum (as a non-Brit) I felt it would be an interesting thing. At the time I was not aware of the propaganda around Brexit, and thought it was a decision for more political and economic control. Which sounded like something that might be good for the country; but as someone not aware of the details, I wasn't sure.

Then I realized one of the main reasons was immigration. Which was my first inkling that something is wrong, and that it can be harmful. Stopping free movement could end up destroying tons of lives and probably affecting the economy in the process. Before I had read about this I thought Britain wanted a Switzerlandesque deal, where you still have free movement and whatnot; just a different trade/politics situation.

And then I saw the full extent of the racism fuelling this. And then I was convinced it was a bad idea.

From the article:

> Jingoism, xenophobia, and Trump-like obnoxiousness have led to an obviously wrong conclusion, so the story goes.

This has things backwards. It might be indeed that leaving the EU was the right decision. The fact that it was caused by xenophobes is the main issue. Because xenophobes will want to move forward on this in a xenophobic way. They are not fuelled by a desire to make the right decision[1]. They are fuelled by xenophobia, with getting the immigrants out being the primary concern. If leaving the EU turns out to be the right thing for Britain, that will be by accident, even a broken clock is on time twice a day.

(This sort of echoes larger issues with our system. Being fuelled by a desire to gain votes is not the same as being fuelled by a desire to make the country better. But it at least is an approximation.)

[1]: They may think they are, but in this situation I mean making that desire foremost and doing the necessary research to make it true. AFAICT this campaign was in part about ignoring the experts, which disqualifies it from being foremost concerned about making the right decision.

"NONE of the Brexiters had any planning in place to get us from in EU to out."

I suspect that is in part down to "Vote Leave" and "Grassroots Out" being political campaigns, not political parties. UKIP, a large voice in the campaign to exit the European Union hold _a_ seat in the Commons, any plan they make is completely irrelevant. Equally, we now face a situation where the next Prime Minister is to be decided by a Conservative leadership election. There is no necessity that the new leader be from the Brexit camp - even if we do end up with the fore-runner, Boris, compromise with the majority of MPs who voted to stay is necessary.

If anything, I place blame at the feet of the government. Planning for losing is not the same as planning to lose. The idea that the only plan the government had for this scenario was "don't let it happen" makes me appreciate the preparation of the Bank of England quite a bit more than I did beforehand.

> At best, the jury is still out. We will be able to consider the question rationally in, perhaps, a decade.

> NONE of the Brexiters had any planning in place to get us from in EU to out. I honestly don't believe any of them even expected to win. The only politician with a plan of any form was Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP.

> Britain is now experiencing overt racism like the last 40 years of progress didn't happen. Brexit has been taken as carte blanche to be proudly racist. I have witnessed this myself, last week, in an area where I'd have expected it to be non-existent.

> The few politicians speaking are all seeking EU-lite, and it seems, wishing to rejoin as much of the single market (with associated costs) as possible.

> By most measures it looks like it's shaping up to be a disaster for Britain.

And for lulz and giggles UK is dragging us down too.

Looks like I will move soon to US.