Brexit is a fake revolt – working-class culture is being hijacked to help the elite

Paul Mason in The Guardian

I love fake revolts of the underclass: I’m a veteran of them. At secondary school, we had a revolt in favour of the right to smoke. The football violence I witnessed in the 1970s and 80s felt like the social order turned on its head. As for the mass outpouring of solidarity with the late Princess Diana, and by implication against the entire cruel monarchic elite, in the end I chucked my bunch of flowers on the pile with the rest.

The problem is, I also know what a real revolt looks like. The miners strike; the Arab Spring; the barricade fighting around Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013. So, to people getting ready for the mother of all revolts on Thursday, I want to point out the crucial difference between a real revolt and a fake one. The elite does not usually lead the real ones. In a real revolt, the rich and powerful usually head for the hills, terrified. Nor are the Sun and the Daily Mail usually to be found egging on a real insurrection.

But, all over Britain, people have fallen for the scam. In the Brexit referendum, we’ve seen what happens when working-class culture gets hijacked – and when the party that is supposed to be defending working people just cannot find the language or the offer to separate a fake revolt from a real one. In many working-class communities, people are getting ready to vote leave not just as a way of telling the neoliberal elite to get stuffed. They also want to discomfort the metropolitan, liberal, university-educated salariat for good measure. For many people involved, it feels like their first ever effective political choice.

I want to have one last go at convincing you that leaving now, under these conditions, would be a disaster. First, let’s recognise the problem. For people in the working classes, wages are at rock bottom. Their employers treat them like dirt. Their high streets are lined with empty shops. Their grown-up kids cannot afford to buy a home. Class sizes at school are too high. NHS waiting times are too long.
I’m glad it has become acceptable to say: “You are right to worry about migration.” But I wish more Labour politicians would spell out why. Working-class people, especially those on low pay in the private sector, worry that in conditions of austerity, housing shortages, wage stagnation and an unlimited supply of migrant labour from Europe has a negative effect on their living standards. For some, that is true.

They are right, too, to worry about the cultural impact. In a big, multi-ethnic city, absorbing a lot of migrants is easy. In small towns, where social capital is already meagre, the migrant population can feel unabsorbed. The structure of temporary migration from Europe means many of those who come don’t vote, or don’t have the right to – which feels unsettling if you understand that it is only by voting that the workforce ever achieved progress. It feels as if, through migration, the establishment got to create the kind of working class it always wanted: fragmented, dislocated, politically distant, weak.

But a Brexit led by Ukip and the Tory right will not make any of these things better: it will make them worse. Take a look at the people leading the Brexit movement. Nigel Farage, Neil Hamilton, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove. They have fought all their lives for one objective: to give more power to employers and less to workers. Many leading Brexiters are on record as wanting to privatise the NHS. They revelled in the destruction of the working-class communities and cultures capable of staging real revolt. Sir James Dyson moved his factory to Malaysia, so much did he love the British workforce. They talk about defying the “elite”. But they are the elite.

Suppose leave wins on Thursday and, within two years, most migration from eastern Europe stops. What is the most likely outcome? For all the rhetoric about “cheap labour”, nobody in the Tory Brexit camp has promised to end it. What they actually promised is to to cut wages and scrap the laws that protect people at work. So even if the migrants stop coming, and maybe a few fruit farms and meat-packing operations in East Anglia shut down, there will still be millions of low-paid jobs on long hours. But guess who will be doing them? Most likely it will be you, the very people flag-waving for the leave camp now: low-skilled people in small towns. And should there be a shortage of unskilled workers, the Brexit camp’s figurehead – Iain Duncan Smith – knows what to do. Before ultimately resigning over benefit cuts, he had made a career out of dragging people out of wheelchairs and off sickbeds and into job assessments designed to cut their benefits.
Some people are fantasising that, if leave wins, Cameron will fall and then there will be a Labour government. But there is no new election on offer. Boris Johnson has already signed a letter pledging to keep Cameron in power if leave wins. Because that’s what elite politicians do: stick together. If leave wins, the most rightwing Tory government since Thatcher will be in charge of negotiating the terms of exit. The same newspapers running fake stories about refugees now will run fake stories about the Labour party to stop it winning the next election.

In the past week, Labour’s frontbench has signalled, loud and clear, that they will take measures to stop the creation of low-paid jobs that only migrants can do; and they will take the issue of free movement into a big renegotiation with the EU as soon as possible. Frankly, they should have done this sooner. I’m glad face-to-face contact with the people they represent has pushed them to accept that free movement should be filtered through strong UK measures to protect the lowest paid and end migrant-only recruitment.

For many people, the Brexit campaign feels, for one brief moment, like the first time they have had control. But the clue is in the word “brief”. Once the vote is over, it will be the rightwing Tories in control. Ask Ukip; ask Boris Johnson: will Brexit guarantee a rise in wages, a cap on rents, a fall in NHS waiting times or class sizes? Ask the leave camp to put targets on these things – not for the longterm, but within 12-18 months. They can’t.

What can is a left-led Labour party, combined with the progressive nationalist parties and the Greens, which will institute real change. There will be no dilemmas in the newsrooms of the Times and Telegraph if that happens: they will unite to crush it.

That’s how you know the difference between a real revolt and a fake one: by its enemies.

The Conservatives are giving us a masterclass in how not to govern

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

There is always a rueful moment following a Conservative election victory, disappointment tinged with the consolation that at least they’ll be solid. Sure, they will want to march back to a time of Victorian certainties, where if you lose it’s because you’re a loser, and if you win, it’s because you goddamn tried. But at least they will captain their vessel with competence and assurance. We might not like where it’s going, but at least we won’t drown.

Consider what good a government of any party can do, if it takes the business of statecraft seriously. It is within its power to solve the housing crisis: not chuck lump sums at the already privileged, but to undertake a building programme of breadth and vision that would change lives. It is easily within a government’s scope to make plans for energy and carbon emissions, half a century into the future. It is within a government’s purview to think radically about what people need, in order to feel optimistic about the future: not just a health service, but a great health service; not just pensions but proper social care; not just benefits but genuine security. All the life-changing architecture of citizenship has been undertaken by good government, thinking decades beyond the electoral cycle, with dreams infinitely greater than personal power.

That’s what is really crushing about our current situation: not that the political landscape was permanently scarred by a brutal act last week; not that we’ve been invited to unleash some pointless vandalism on the EU on the basis of lies from its most ardent proponents; not that all of us have been dragged into a vicious battle between ideas so hollow and limited – free-market fundamentalism versus the same with added racism – that you wouldn’t want to be detained by them for five minutes eavesdropping on the bus, let alone see them obliterate everything else in the public discourse. No, the really dispiriting thing is that we haven’t got a government.

When they’re good, governments embody civility; they can take the instinctive care that we have for one another and turn it into something solid, whether that’s a street light or a tax credit; they can turn hopes into plans; they can make people’s lives better. There were times before this referendum when it may have seemed preferable to have a government doing nothing to one as socially destructive as David Cameron’s. But it would be wrong to lose faith in politics altogether, because of the terrifying spectacle of people doing it wantonly. It is time to remind ourselves what good government can do.

Governments, when they are solid, maintain standards in public life. They do not panic when they’re criticised by the Daily Mail in the middle of a parliamentary term, or when a more radical party such as Ukip seems to be peeling off voters. They do not throw up their hands and offer referendums on amorphous, incomprehensible matters, because they do not sacrifice the stability of the nation for the sake of their own party, and they would not drag a whole continent into their squalid leadership battle.

But if that’s a little specific, let’s frame it more broadly: good governments insist on the decent and truthful use of statistics. They can’t enforce this – they can’t imprison their opponents for making up bogus numbers, and repeating them until half the country believes that they’re true. They can’t do much to insist that the press doesn’t twist or misrepresent the facts, doesn’t stir up hatred with relentless falsification. They can’t even make it a law, I shouldn’t think, that every time a newspaper lies about a foreigner, it has to print the correction with the same prominence as the lie. That would be far too intrusive, a bit too Leveson-y.

Yet a good government will set standards. It will tell the truth itself, and it will be trenchant about accuracy from others. It will not pander, and when it sees racist propaganda material it will say so. No general election has ever been as ugly as this referendum, as personal, as vitriolic, as full of accusations of mendacity, so that the casual voter basically has to guess who is telling the truth by how fast they’re talking and the look in their eyes (although this does give one pretty reliable answer: not Michael Gove). Good governments respect the institutions that provide sound and impartial analysis – universities, the civil service, statistics authorities – and advance their work, rather than routinely falling foul of it themselves.

Good governments, even in the teeth of internecine squabbling, continue to govern: they don’t announce a complete overhaul of prisons, then luxuriate in a six-month hiatus and leave the service wondering whether it was ever meant to be seen through. They don’t part-privatise probation and then lose interest, they don’t try to academise every school and realise the senselessness of that halfway through; they don’t pick a fight with the whole NHS that takes innumerable man-hours to solve and yields nothing but lasting unpleasantness.

Six months ago, this was, it was argued, all the opposition’s fault; a party with a slim majority was behaving like a party with a huge majority, because it knew it would face no resistance. It’s for another conversation whether the opposition has improved, but the question is moot anyway; there is nothing to oppose. The business of governing has ground to a halt, and in its place we find men arguing over whose exaggeration is the most egregious and who looks too scruffy for public life.

This is not the time to lose faith in politics; there has never been a more urgent time to rekindle faith. Remember what politics can do. We cannot conclude, from this sad episode, that its glory days are over.

Three shirts, four pairs of trousers: meet Japan's 'hard-core' minimalists

Reuters in The Guardian

Fumio Sasaki gave away the majority of his possessions and now lives with just the bare essentials.

 

The bathroom cupboard of minimalist Fumio Sasaki. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters




Fumio Sasaki’s one-room Tokyo apartment is so stark friends liken it to an interrogation room. He owns three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and a meagre scattering of various other items.

Money isn’t the issue. The 36-year-old editor has made a conscious lifestyle choice, joining a growing number of Japanese deciding that less is more.

Influenced by the spare aesthetic of Japan’s traditional Zen Buddhism, minimalists buck the norm in a fervently consumerist society by dramatically paring back their possessions.

Sasaki, once a passionate collector of books, CDs and DVDs, became tired of keeping up with trends two years ago.

“I kept thinking about what I did not own, what was missing,” he says.

He spent the next year selling possessions or giving them to friends.

“Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off. I have become a lot more active,” he says.

Minimalist Naoki Numahata talks to his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ei, in their living-room in Tokyo. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Others welcome the chance to own only things they truly like – a philosophy also applied by Mari Kondo, a consultant whose “KonMari” organisational methods have swept the United States.

“It’s not that I had more things than the average person, but that didn’t mean that I valued or liked everything I owned,” says Katsuya Toyoda, an online publication editor who has only one table and one futon in his 22 sqm apartment.

“I became a minimalist so I could let things I truly liked surface in my life.“

Inspiration for Japan’s minimalists came from the US, where early adherents included Steve Jobs.

Definitions vary, because the goal is not just decluttering but re-evaluating what posessions mean, to gain something else – in Sasaki’s case, time to travel.

 Utensils lie in a kitchen drawer in the home of minimalist Saeko Kushibiki in Fujisawa, south of Tokyo. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Sasaki and others believe there are thousands of hard-core minimalists, with possibly thousands more interested.

Some say minimalism is actually not foreign but a natural outgrowth of Zen Buddhism and its stripped-down world view.

“In the west, making a space complete means placing something there,” says Naoki Numahata, 41, a freelance writer.

“But with tea ceremonies, or Zen, things are left incomplete on purpose to let the person’s imagination make that space complete.”

Minimalists also argue that having fewer possessions is eminently practical in Japan, which is regularly shaken by earthquakes.

 Minimalist Saeko Kushibiki stores away her futon mattress in her apartment in Fujisawa. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

In 2011, a 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and led to many re-evaluating possessions, Sasaki said.

“Thirty to 50% of earthquake injuries occur through falling objects,” he said, gesturing around his empty apartment.

“But in this room, you don’t have that concern.”

The progressive argument for leaving the EU is not being heard

Larry Elliot in The Guardian


It is now nearly nine years since the problems of three hedge funds heralded the arrival of global financial and economic chaos. Britain’s EU referendum this week is the latest manifestation of that crisis.

That is not the way the debate in the UK has been framed. For one side, the decision is all about taking back control, especially over immigration. For the other, it is about the potential consequences for the economy in general and individuals in particular.

This narrow focus reflects the fact that the referendum has been a contest between two wings of the Conservative party, neither of which has any great love for the EU. Few of the bigger themes have been drawn out by this blue-on-blue affair.

There is, however, an obvious reason why immigration has proved an effective weapon for the leave side. Life is tougher for millions of Britons on modest incomes than it was a decade ago.

Contrast the state of the UK when the accession to the EU of Poland and other former Soviet bloc countries led to strong net migration in 2004. At that time, average earnings were growing by 4-5% a year, the Labour government was investing heavily in schools and hospitals and the eurozone appeared to be over its initial problems.

A second big increase in net migration has occurred since the great recession of 2008 and 2009, but the economic and political environment has changed. Real earnings have been squeezed, the expansion of the public sector has been halted and the eurozone has been in a state of permanent crisis.

The British economy has become increasingly dominated by the fortunes of the financial sector, with the bankers responsible for the worst slump since the 1930s escaping pretty much scot free. London and the rest of the UK have become two countries, which explains why hostility to the EU increases with distance from the capital.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the UK. It has become commonplace to bracket growing support for leave in poorer parts of Britain with Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican candidate in this year’s US presidential election, but populist and anti EU sentiment is on the rise across Europe.

The US research company Pew conducted a survey earlier this year to test sentiment towards the EU. In Britain, 48% said they had an unfavourable view of the EU and 44% said they had a favourable view. In France, the anti-EU sentiment was much more pronounced at 61% and 38% in favour, while in Germany there had been an eight-point drop in support for the EU in the past year, leaving those in favour only narrowly ahead at 50% against 48% .
The impact of the great recession in Europe has been exacerbated by monetary union, a policy blunder of catastrophic proportions. The euro has been responsible for the slow growth and high unemployment that has angered the French, and the high debts and that have alarmed the Germans. Stir in the unexpectedly large flows of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, and you have a toxic mix.

Last summer, when the Greek debt crisis was at its most intense, Europe’s leaders came up with a plan. The “five presidents’ report” laid down a step-by-step approach to a United States of Europe, with banking union followed by a common budget and finally political union. Getting even the least controversial part of this agenda – banking union – past sceptical European electorates has proved impossible. Yet the alternative approach, breaking up the euro and giving countries more control over their own economic destiny, is seen as not just potentially dangerous but also a betrayal of the idea of ever-closer union.

When Britain first sought to join the Common Market in the 1960s it did so for pragmatic, not ideological reasons. There was no great desire to pool sovereignty in pursuit of wider political goals, merely a feeling that Germany, France and the Netherlands were growing faster and had more modern economies. After Britain finally became a member of the European club in 1973, there was admiration for Germany’s control of inflation. In the 1980s, the UK left wing changed sides because it saw Europe as a bulwark against Margaret Thatcher. European solidarity was advocated in the 1990s as the best defence against the forces of global capitalism unleashed by the end of the cold war, which is why many on the left wanted Britain to join the single currency.

Times have changed. Even with a welcome pickup in activity in the past year, Europe’s growth performance since the launch of the euro has been pitiful. Talk of protecting workers’ rights is meaningless unless you have a job, and millions of Europe’s citizens do not. The structural adjustment programmes forced on those countries that have required financial bailouts have involved savage attacks on workers’ rights, including collective bargaining. The EU has not taken the fight to multinational capital. Rather, Brussels has become a honeypot for corporate lobbyists demanding deregulation and the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

One of the great ironies of the UK’s referendum debate is that Europe, with its austerity programmes and its drift towards neoliberalism, has been moving in a direction that rightwing Conservatives would tend to support. Just as in the UK in the 1980s, unemployment has weakened the power of organised labour and the trend is for more competition and for free markets.

There is a modern and progressive argument for leaving the EU, but it has struggled to be heard during this dispiriting campaign. It is that Europe is unable to deliver because it is wedded to backward-looking ideas. Or to adapt the words that David Cameron used on his first outing as Conservative leader to taunt Tony Blair, it was the future once.

There is a leftwing case for staying in too. This accepts that the EU is far from perfect and must change, but says the answer is to work for a kinder, gentler, greener and more equal Europe from within. Exit, by contrast, would be the catalyst for a breakup of the EU that would give rise to aggressive nationalism and leave Britain at the mercy of rightwing Conservatives who would have the wherewithal to cause immense damage before there was a chance to get rid of them at an election.

Yet, it is stretching a point to argue that the treatment of Greece has much to do with the theories of Maynard Keynes or that TTIP would sit comfortably with Fritz Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” vision. Europe has been going in an entirely different direction, which is why aggressive nationalism will continue to be a problem even if Britain votes to remain. That’s because Europe’s economic model isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a long time. Bad economics leads to bad politics. Always has, always will.

Brussels isn’t the bad guy. Tory cuts cause Britain’s troubles

Phillip Inman in The Guardian


The current and previous governments are to blame for our economic woes, not Brussels. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images

Don’t blame the EU for your troubles, blame Tory austerity. This is the message Labour voters should hear from Jeremy Corbyn. It is a message Ed Miliband could have made more forcefully during his term as Labour leader, when the conversation on the doorstep turned to immigration. Instead, he appeared to choke with embarrassment.

Corbyn has a higher embarrassment threshold. He could look the immigration question in the eye and not blink. Unfortunately, the Islington North MP considers debating immigration off limits.

So, last week, Corbyn tried to persuade voters that the EU is the workers’ friend and a bulwark against a bonfire of employment protections. That’s not an unreasonable position. Yet if immigration is the main source of anger outside the south-east, and if it is driving the Brexit campaign to a possible victory, the subject needs to be tackled head-on. If you think Britain is a great place to live that has been ruined by an alliance with other EU nations, you are mistaken and Labour needs to make that point.

Here are five reasons that the former coalition government and the current Tory administration are to blame, and not Brussels.

Jobs


It is easy to walk around an engineering practice in London, a hospital in Leeds or a leek farm in Lincolnshire and conclude that foreigners are stealing “our” jobs. But, in the main, the roles would be unfilled if they were kept out. The work would probably go abroad.

On one level, the fault lies with consumers and employers, large and small. Consumers would buy a foreign leek before one grown here picked by a Brit who was paid more and treated better. Employers are at fault for not training school leavers, older workers and job switchers because it’s cheaper to hire foreigners. Profits are calculated on this basis. Moreover, without cheaper labour there would, in many cases, be no business.

So foreigners allow employers to expand the number of jobs. That’s what the figures tell us. Compared to this time last year, there are 461,000 more people in work. People from the rest of the EU grabbed a majority of the jobs, but the substitution effect with UK nationals was only at the margins. Overall, the number in work just keeps going up and the UK now has a record employment rate of 74.2%.

Look a little closer and it is clear the government has played a big part by cutting skills and training budgets, laying waste to further education and demanding workers accept precarious employment, whether it be zero-hours contracts or self employment.

Vacancies


Job vacancies are running at a higher level than we have seen at any time this century. A small dip in recent months still leaves the number at 750,000. Most are for services jobs, as one might expect, with the largest number among retailers and wholesalers. Car repair firms reported a 143,000 shortage. The NHS and social work sector accounted for 119,000 of the total.

Finding a mechanic, or hiring a nurse, is as much a problem in Leeds as in London. It’s not just about a lack of skilled jobs being created in the north, but also a mismatch of people to jobs – not a problem invented in Brussels.

Wages

Adjusted for inflation, average wages have collapsed since the 2008 crash. Workers absorbed cuts in overtime and basic hours to keep their jobs.

Since the recovery got into full swing in 2014, wages have nudged ahead of inflation, but not enough to fill the gap. Part of the reason is the lack of investment by employers who rely on cheap workers.

But the UK, like all developed economies, is also suffering from the effects of globalisation, which allows multinationals to invest where subsidies are most generous. Ford has centred much of its European operations in Turkey for that reason. Without investment in skilled jobs there will be no increase in wages, but that is not on the Tory agenda.

Housing

If the worry is that housing is either poor quality or too costly, for yourself and your children, blame successive governments for failing to support good quality state-sponsored housing.

The taxes from migrant workers could be used to fund it, but the current and previous governments have preferred to reduce the top rate of tax and protect pensioners’ benefits.

There is no evidence in the last 100 years that shows private builders can meet the nation’s needs. This means housing associations have to find funds to build – but ministers are denying them access to finance, and councils can’t offer builders land when they are forced to sell to the highest bidder.

Health service

If the queue at the hospital and GP is a problem, this is the result of austerity measures that cut spending growth from 4% a year in real terms to 1% since 2010. The NHS, coping with an ageing society, was supposed to implement reforms to fill the gap but, to no one’s surprise, this project has so far failed. Worse, in his last budget, George Osborne slashed council spending on health by £800m. That’s cash used for local mental health services and preventative policies, such as tackling obesity. He told local authorities to put up council tax by 2% to fill the gap.

It’s cuts that lead to queues – in a race to the bottom that Osborne, despite his rhetoric, thinks is just fine.

Why failure is the key to flying high

 

If at first you don’t succeed: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock


Matthew Syed in The Guardian




We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?

The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.

Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”

Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.

In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.

But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.

We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.

Brexit is being driven by English nationalism. And it will end in self-rule

Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian

It is a question the English used to ask about their subject peoples: are they ready for self-government? But it is now one that has to be asked about the English themselves. It’s not facetious: England seems to be stumbling towards a national independence it has scarcely even discussed, let alone prepared for. It is on the brink of one of history’s strangest nationalist revolutions.

When you strip away the rhetoric, Brexit is an English nationalist movement. If the Leave side wins the referendum, it will almost certainly be without a majority in either Scotland or Northern Ireland and perhaps without winning Wales either. The passion that animates it is English self-assertion. And the inexorable logic of Brexit is the logic of English nationalism: the birth of a new nation state bounded by the Channel and the Tweed.

Over time, the main political entity most likely to emerge from Brexit is not a Britain with its greatness restored or a sweetly reunited kingdom. It is a standalone England. Scotland will have a second referendum on independence, this time with the lure of staying in the European Union. Northern Ireland will be in a horrendous bind, cut off from the rest of the island by a European border and with the UK melting around it. Its future as an unwanted appendage of a shrunken Britain is unsustainable. Wales is more uncertain, but a resurgence of Welsh nationalism after Brexit is entirely possible, especially after a Scottish departure from the UK. After Brexit, an independent England will emerge by default.

And this is of course a perfectly legitimate aspiration. Nationalism, whether we like it or not, is almost universal and the English have as much right to it as anyone else. There’s nothing inherently absurd about the notion of England as an independent nation state. It’s just that if you’re going to create a new nation state, you ought to be talking about it, arguing for it, thinking it through. And this isn’t happening. England seems to be muddling its way towards a very peculiar event: accidental independence.

The first thing about the idea of England as a nation state that governs itself and only itself is that it is radically new. The Brexit campaign is fuelled by a mythology of England proudly “standing alone”, as it did against the Spanish armada and Adolf Hitler. But when did England really stand alone? The answer, roughly speaking, is for 300 of the past 1,200 years. England has been a political entity for only two relatively short periods. The first was between the early 10th century, when the first English national kingdom was created by Athelstan, and 1016 when it was conquered by Cnut the Dane. The second was between 1453, when English kings effectively gave up their attempts to rule France, and 1603, when James VI and I united the thrones of England and Scotland.

Otherwise – and this includes all of the past 400 years – England has always been part of at least one larger entity: an Anglo-French kingdom, the United Kingdom in its various forms, a global empire, the European Union. The English are much less used to being left to their own devices than they think they are.

English nationalists can quite reasonably point out that many emerging nation states have even less experience of being a standalone, self-governing entity – my own country, Ireland, being an obvious example. The big difference is that other countries actually go through a process – often very long and difficult – of preparing themselves politically, culturally and emotionally for the scary business of being (to borrow a term from Irish nationalism) “ourselves alone”. In England, there is no process. A decisive step is about to be taken without acknowledging the path ahead.

As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: ‘There is no future in England’s dreaming’

Hardly anyone is even talking about England – all the Brexit arguments are framed in terms of Britain or the UK, as if these historically constructed and contingent entities will simply carry on regardless in the new dispensation. The Brexiters imagine an earthquake that will, curiously, leave the domestic landscape unaltered. English nationalism is thus a very strange phenomenon – a passion that is driving a nation towards historic change but one that seems unwilling even to speak its own name.

It is hard to think of any parallel for this. Successful national independence movements usually have five things going for them: a deep sense of grievance against the existing order; a reasonably clear (even if invented) idea of a distinctive national identity; a shared (albeit largely imaginary) narrative of the national past; a new elite-in-waiting; and a vision of a future society that will be better because it is self-governing.

The English nationalism that underlies Brexit has, at best, one of these five assets: the sense of grievance is undeniably powerful. It’s also highly ambiguous – it is rooted in the shrinking of British social democracy but the actual outcome of Brexit will be an even closer embrace of unfettered neoliberalism. There is a weird mismatch between the grievance and the solution.

None of the other four factors applies. As a cultural identity, Englishness is wonderfully potent but not distinctive – its very success means that it is global property. From the English language to the Beatles, from Shakespeare to the Premier League, its icons are planetary. The great cultural appeal of nationalism – we need political independence or our unique culture will die – just doesn’t wash. Moreover, this power of English culture derives precisely from its capacity to absorb immigrant energies. From the Smiths to Zadie Smith, from the Brontës to Dizzee Rascal, it is very hard to imagine an “English” culture that is not also Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Irish, Jewish and so on.

Is there a shared narrative of the English past that functions even as a useful collective invention? English nationalism has a hard time integrating the past of John Ball and the Levellers, of Mary Wollstonecraft and Tom Paine with that of monarchs, generals and imperial power.

As for an elite-in-waiting, the English nationalist movement certainly has one. But the handover of elite power that will accompany this particular national revolution will surely be the most underwhelming in history — from one set of public school and Oxbridge Tories to another. And this elite’s vision of a future society seems to come down to the same lump of money – the (dishonestly) alleged £350m a week that will be saved by leaving the EU – being spent over and over on everything from the National Health Service to farm subsidies. Plus, of course, fewer immigrants, thereby creating some kind of imaginary Lebensraum. There is no attempt to articulate any set of social principles by which the new England might govern itself. As Johnny Rotten (a typically English child of immigrants) put it: “There is no future in England’s dreaming.”

When it comes down to it, nationalism is about the line between Them and Us. The Brexiters seem pretty clear about Them – Brussels bureaucrats and immigrants. It’s just the Us bit that they haven’t quite worked out yet. Being ready for self-government demands a much better sense of the self you want to govern.