natütlich ist das kein vergleich, es ist nur so albern

Ich trinke meinen Tee mit Milch, richtigen Tee nicht dieses beige Wasser das man in D als Tee bezeichnet :) ich habe allerdings in den 14.5 Jahren die ich jetzt hier lebe noch nie jemanden getroffen der das Empire zurueck moechte, noch nicht mal einer der opinionated Taxifahrer die mir oft non-stop die Ohren vollreden. Klar gibt es unter den Pro-Brexiter auch so einige die schlicht xenophob sind, ganz sicher, aber die allermeisten sind das nicht.
Bryan Appleyard (who irritates the bejeezus out of me usually, mostly when he attempts to write about science) schrieb einen sehr guten Kommentar dazu unmittelbar nach dem Referendum, wait, I find it, worth a read.


The Times, June 26th 2016

A world-shaking howl of protest against the elites

Bryan Appleyard

Bryan Appleyard argues that the bankers, politicians and Eurocrats were not punished for the great crash of 2008. Now they have had their comeuppance for not heeding the fears of the people

When Bob Geldof and his friends partied on the Thames in their “remain” boat the harbour master drew alongside to ask them to keep the noise down. They had a looped playlist that included Please Don’t Go, If You Leave Me Now and The “In” Crowd.
Incensed by the requests for quiet, Geldof called his pal David Cameron to complain. He got through but Dave could not help; he was prepping for prime minister’s questions. Vote “leave” fishermen — their lives having been ruined by EU quotas — hosed down the Geldof boat from a trawler.
Think about that scene; think about it in the light of the referendum result. The pig ignorance, the callousness but, above all, the networking power of Geldof’s ship of fools says it all. The British elites, whether Etonian square or pop hip, did not get it and the signs are, I am afraid, that neither they nor the Eurocrats ever will.
Full disclosure: I voted “remain” in spite of Europe being a basket case and the coldly cynical exploitation of Jo Cox’s death by the remainers. I just wanted this brief European peace to last a little longer and staying in was — maybe — one way to make that happen. All pretence that the remainers were respecting Cox was detonated by their carefully calibrated hints that her death was all the fault of the leavers.
Over and over again in the past weeks I have seen WB Yeats’s poem The Second Coming quoted by complacent remainers — “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” Do they really want to say that now; to say that 52% of the UK population are “the worst”? Yes, they do. The social media feeds of remainers are full of the predictable terms — “idiots”, “racists”, “fascists”. The dog, as it is said, returns to his vomit.
OK, this is personal. Three years ago I was sitting drinking coffee in an empty shopping centre in my home town, Bolton. I was there to give a lecture at my old school. I had done well — good middle-class background, Cambridge and so on.
Bolton had not. It was not the vibrant place I remembered; it was a shabby ghost town. Wealth and life had drained into booming Manchester but mainly into the elite enclaves of London and the southeast.
Then there was the 2008-9 crisis. At first it looked like gross incompetence in the City. On closer examination it turned out to be sheer criminality.
When I was a financial journalist on The Times a wise man told me that if a bank grew faster than — I think it was — 5% it was crooked. As the Royal Bank of Scotland died of shame — well, it didn’t but it should have — I thought how right he had been.
Then, as the gag at the end of that superbly clear-sighted film The Big Short points out, nothing happened. Bankers should have been imprisoned by the score but they were not; all the big banks should have been broken up but they were not. The people reeled, seethed, shrugged and lost trust in the equity of the system. A Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans in 2002 were satisfied with opportunities to get ahead by working hard and 22% dissatisfied. By 2014 only 54% were satisfied and 45% dissatisfied.
The collapse of trust was, I sense, far worse in Britain. They were all at it, the common people thought, all except us. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and then Cameron and George Osborne fomented revolution by their inaction in the City.
The “banksters” and their friends got away with it and made billions from the ensuing recession. They gleefully joined a globalised super-elite with little to offer the working or indeed middle classes by way of jobs or wealth in any form. The wealth of chief executives and financiers soared; that of everybody else flatlined. Inequality is now at Edwardian levels.
The degree to which money today seems to be about nothing but itself became apparent in the BHS calamity. The evidence from Sir Philip Green and others to the select committee made it clear that what the company ostensibly did was as nothing next to the financial trickery that ownership of the chain made possible — not to mention the vulture-like City “advisers” who plucked at the still-living body.
Oh, and meanwhile the Eurocrats tortured the Greeks, lost control of their borders, generated mass unemployment and descended into sordid negotiations with Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. All of which made me wonder: why had the people gone quietist? I couldn’t imagine a better reason to hit the streets or the ballot box.
The revolt against the elites is now a Europe and America-wide movement. But it is not one thing, nor does it fit neatly into old categories of right and left. Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece are anti-elitists of the left; in France Marine Le Pen’s National Front is far right. Poland and Hungary have moved uncomfortably far to the right. I would like to say Labour represents a more coherent anti-elitist sentiment but, sadly, “incoherent” is Jeremy Corbyn’s middle name.
In America it was initially all on the right with the Tea Party and Ted Cruz, then came the socialist Bernie Sanders and the chimeric Donald Trump — very right on some things such as immigration, very left on others such as trade policy.
The nativist far right and the statist far left are two sides of the same coin and both represent a fundamental threat to liberal democracy. Indeed illiberal democracy is now in danger of becoming a global phenomenon. It will also come to America if Trump gets in. This failure of liberal democracy to work for — or even to be understood by — the people is the fault of the rulers, not, as the British bien-pensant left seems to think, of the ruled.
But to return, finally, to rock’n’roll, not the Europop Geldof and his friends dad-danced to on that boat but something more authentic. British rock flowered in the 1960s, as did many art forms, thanks to the fall in inequality that freed up two postwar generations, including myself. That has been reversed and class — both on the right and the left — has reasserted itself, only now to be confronted by the revolt against the elites.
One of the finest flowerings of that tradition came in the 1990s with Jarvis Cocker’s supremely prescient song Common People about a posh girl who wants to slum it a little. But clever Cocker knew she could never really do it because “You’ll never fail like common people/ You’ll never watch your life slide out of view, and dance and drink and screw/ Because there’s nothing else to do.”
With the Brexit vote the common people have raised Cocker’s fine dandy disdain to a world-shaking howl of protest. Now they can watch in wonder the spectacle of the breaking of the Bullingdon brotherhood of Cameron and Johnson.
What will ensue? A punishment of Britain and a tightening of Eurocrat control to deter imitators within the eurozone? That is what threatened elites have always done. A dismal slide into competing nationalisms? Or, perhaps, a Europe-wide liberal democratic enlightenment, a return to first principles of equity and mutual concern, a cull of the discredited elites? Don’t hold your breath.