Brexit. How did it come to this?

Brexit. People Slain in the Street Over a Bureaucracy?

How did it all come to this? A Labour MP shot in the street. Jo Cox was gunned down in her constituency by Thomas Mair, a 52 year old suspected of both mental health issues and far right political ties.

Every nation has its bizarre quirks. There are always issues in that country that make no sense to outsiders. Here in Australia it's indigenous affairs. Sensible thoughtful people abandon all reason and begin shouting at each other the moment aboriginal affairs are mentioned. For the USA its guns. The Americans can't even keep AR15 assault rifles out of the hands of known terrorist sympathizers. For the British it's Europe.

Separated by 20 miles of water, Britain is in Europe, but not of it. Or at least that's how Brits like to see it. That water has always signified danger to Britain. Invaders like the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans all crossed the channel to plunder Britain's "Green and Pleasant Land."

Britain learned to defend that water, developing the greatest navy the world has ever seen. Napoleon learned to his detriment not to challenge the Royal Navy and Goring's Luftwaffe learnt that the the Royal Air force was adequate to the task of defending Britain in 1940.

This is how the British see Europe. Dangerous and other.

Britain and Continental Europe also tend to see their shared history differently to. For continental Europe the second world war was horrific and tragic. It was a war that raged across the European continent. The forefathers of modern Germans and Austrians started a war which shattered Poland, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Norway, etc. To say nothing of the horrific destruction rained upon the USSR. Then there's the fact of the holocaust. 6 million Jews dead.

The German and Austrian nation were wholly culpable. France capitulated to the Axis and later began to transport French Jews to the death camps with a surprising fervor. Adults in those countries today were often reluctant to ask Grandpa exactly what they did in the war. They might not like the answers they received.

Contrast that with the British view of their role in WW2. At first they were the dutiful ally protecting France. Then the lone holdout against the personification of evil, Britain was challenged almost to breaking point, but held the line, allowing democracy to survive in the western hemisphere. This was truly "Their Finest Hour."

Britain then was able to take the war back to Europe with American assistance. Liberating western europe through devastating bombing campaigns and the D Day invasion. While casualties were enormous, both allied and axis, Britain never wavered in its feeling of moral superiority. Hitler had started this war, and by God Churchill was going to finish it.

In Continental Europe a consensus soon formed around the idea "never again." It's a wholly understandable formula born of a feeling of moral failure and guilt, with a great deal of practicality thrown in. Five short years after the war the European Coal and Steel Community united Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands and Luxembourg in a common market, synchronizing their laws to make trade simple and easy between those nations.

The philosophy behind the European Economic Community as the union became known after the 1957 treaty of Rome was to unite the nations in trade, creating wealth for all, but also an interdependence between nations so that a holocaust like World War Two could never again spring from a European well. It worked. Extremely well. The EEC continued to grow adding Ireland and Denmark in 1973. But the largest market added in '73 was Britain.

The campaign to join was fraught and a referendum to leave was held in 1975. You could consider it Brexit 1. The stay campaign won handily. This was a nine nation EEC composed of developed nations.

The EU has of course developed massively since 1975. It has expanded from nine members to twenty eight. Herein lies the problem. The EU has developed a Parliament, and has started to look like a superstate coalescing from the disparate nations of Europe.

Also of concern is the freedom of movement granted to all European union citizens. This was fine when all member nations maintained a high standard of living, but the addition of former Warsaw Pact nations with substantially lower wages creates a serious issue. The fact that EU citizens from nations like Romania and Poland can now legally move to the UK is disconcerting to British people who are concerned that these people come to UK, either take British Jobs for lower wages, driving down wages for low paid work or end up on welfare, stretching an already tight budget tighter.

Those people displaced by low wage workers are mostly those who will vote for a brexit. Frankly these people are voting for their own interests. I completely understand why people in these circumstances would vote to leave.

Herein lies the problem. Right now the needs of the less educated and poorest of society are not being looked after. This is not just a British problem. In the USA those people who vote for Donald Trump look very familiar to those British political watchers. They are the poorly educated, the white poor who have been the losers in the new world ushered in by modern Neo-Liberal philosophy.

So here we come to the crux of the matter. Neo-Liberalism is causing a crisis in our society. It is leaving behind a large section of the population of developed western nations. The continued globalisation of our world means that the factory worker in the Birmingham England or Birmingham Alabama are both in competition with the worker in Guadalahara Mexico, Guangzau China, or indeed Poznan Poland.

In this wage competition between the developed world and the developing world there can only be one winner. The developing world. Of course they will make items cheaper than their counterparts in the west.

The "other" tends to be a whipping boy for all the problems (real or perceived) that poor disempowered people experience. Whether that be the recent immigrants or the Jewish people of Nazi Germany, in difficult economic times it's always the "other" who suffer.

Demagogues like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage are always waiting on the sidelines to whip the fear and hopelessness into anger and hatred. I think we can add a new name to this group. Boris Johnson. These types are the real villains of this piece. They are the exploiters of fear. They manipulate people for their own ends. For Trump and Johnson, the top job beckons to them and they intend to ride a wave of hatred to the Prime Ministership or the Presidency.

History provides the greatest warning possible about these types. One such Demagogue blamed Communists, Socialists and Jews in Germany during another economic crisis during the late 1920's. History records his ascension to Chancellor in January 1933. Soon he was not being called Chancellor, but Fuhrer.