Originally a comment by Maureen Brian on Whether nationalism is really the fever and liberalism the normal condition.

Sorry, John, but you can’t understand the present without understanding how we got here. The British Archipelago is at the edge of a vast continent which stretches from Japan to the Atlantic coast of Europe. It has a temperate climate and is endowed with a variety of natural resources.

Therefore it is a place that people might want to get to. It is also a place where it would be inevitable that the natural movements of people would have to stop, regroup and develop the technologies to move further because no-one arrived here who was able to walk on water, let alone do it for three thousand miles to get to the next place which was similarly endowed with the means of survival, the Americas.

So, at the end of the last ice age when the whole place had been covered in several kilometres thick of ice, say 10,000 years ago, there were no inhabitants at all. Every last one of us here today is the descendant of “immigrants” the first of whom crossed the land bridge between England and what is now France and the Low Countries to hunt during the summer and later to settle as the climate improved. Among those peoples were the ones who brought us agriculture, which was not developed here, linked us into trade routes across the continents, brought new materials and new technologies.

Some have theorised that all of this may be why we industrialised first but that’s a whole library of books you’d never read so let us move on.

I have no idea where you are on the planet but i’m pretty sure you can’t prove that all your ancestors were within a day’s walk from there even 1,000 years ago. I have evidence of one strand of my ancestry in a particular place, where I don’t live now, dating back to 937 CE, but that is about as far back as anyone can go unless you are part of a royal family in a literate society. I repeat, we are all immigrants. We all descend from species which arose in the Rift Valley of eastern Africa and we all moved about.

You seem to misunderstand the entire system for dealing with the new people arriving. Refugees, a term with a legal definition, and asylum seekers are housed, sometimes in pretty grotty conditions, and get just over £30 a week which is not even subsistence. Now some get their paperwork sorted out quickly but others stay in that limbo for up to 10 years. They hate it but are all agreed that it’s better than being dead.

The sudden arrival of much greater numbers of people seeking work, which almost all find, does of course put stresses and strains on the system. Sometimes their appearance causes a small war e.g.Darfur but this is not inevitable or usual. Besides, it’s what we pay governments to manage, though some do it better than others.

If you have evidence and can give me a link to it of vast numbers of people arriving here, claiming every known benefit and staying that way for years then let me, let us all see it. More common, as it has been for centuries, is that those who were here earlier exploit, underpay and abuse the newcomers.

Among the ones I’ve known personally are a couple of doctors, a high-powered lawyer with a sideline in journalism and a professor of physics. What we should worry about is that so few of them get to work at the level of which they are capable, often because of racial and religious prejudice. We should also worry, surely, about the fact that so many people are displaced now because of continued imperialist wars. The Chilcot Report is due out in a couple of weeks – see that for why many of those moving right now are Iraqis and Syrians.

You sneer at me for seeking to understand what is going on and wave the spectre of the far right at me. I’m glad I have enough grasp of history and of human beings not to be fooled by the appalling guff they talk and to resist the violence which they actively promote. I’m glad I have the sense to know that fascism and its little brothers were never defeated by agreeing with them, something you seem only too willing to do.

There are times when you can’t beat having long conversations with people who have numbers tattooed on their inner arms and veterans of the International Brigades. You’ll have to find another source, though, because those opportunities are almost gone.

There was this:

“How did you vote?” said Pooh.

“Leave,” said Piglet.

“I voted remain,” said Pooh.

“Are we still friends?” said Piglet.

“Yes…yes we’re still friends,” said Pooh.

“Good,” said Piglet. “Let’s go and get pissed.”

Jennie Stevenson tweaked it slightly.

“How did you vote?” said Pooh.

“Leave,” said Piglet.

“I voted remain,” said Pooh.

“Are we still friends?” said Piglet.

“Well to be honest, I’m not really sure” said Pooh, uncharacteristically thoughtfully. “It’s a complex issue and not really one that can be reduced to seven lines of text for the purposes of a rather twee meme.

“On the one hand, a belief in unity, that we’re stronger together, and that when we work as a team we both benefit, was one of the main reasons why I voted as I did.

“On the other hand, whilst I appreciate that, just as I did, you chose your vote based on what you thought was for the best, you have precipitated a huge financial collapse, destabilised my country, and threatened the future of my children, and it’s hard for me to forget that, especially within a matter of hours.

“It’s entirely possible that we’re going to end up with a very much depleted Sixty Acre Wood, and while you might have no issue with the other animals who live here, you sided with those who did. As of yesterday, Kanga’s had to go into hiding, Rabbit’s marching to Christopher Robin’s house demanding her immediate repatriation, and Tigger’s had donkey shit shoved through his letterbox. While you might not have wanted that, you legitimised it, and decided that other animals’ lives and security were collateral damage.

“It’s true that you’re still the small, massively overmarketed stuffed animal that you were before, but realistically I’ve seen another side of you that I hadn’t before and it’s going to take me some time to process that.

“And whenever I tried to discuss this with you beforehand, you either accused me of scaremongering or insisted on ignoring me and showing me pictures of cats instead.

“So rather than pressing me for assurances I’m in no position to make right now, I’d appreciate it if you could give me some space and allow me to get off my face on honey and grieve the future that I thought I had, which has been destroyed in the favour of the one that you’ve dragged me into.

“And if you don’t, I’ll post you to Cameron. All right?”

Remember the conclusion of Dorothy Parker’s review of Winnie the Pooh? “Tonstant Weader frowed up.”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn sacked Hilary Benn in the middle of the night and many Labour MPs have quit the shadow cabinet in response, while the BBC is reporting that Corbyn sabotaged the Remain campaign.

Interesting times.

The latest update from the Guardian:

Writing for the Guardian, Phil Wilson – the chair of the Labour in for Britain group – has called on Jeremy Corbyn to resign, claiming he sabotaged the party’s remain campaign.

[Corbyn] himself issued a note to all MPs on 17 September 2015 telling them that Labour would campaign to remain in the European Union. And yet he decided to go on holiday in the middle of the campaign. He did not visit the Labour heartlands of the north-east and instead raised esoteric issues such as TTIP which had no resonance on the doorstep.

This leads to me to the greatest betrayal and the final straw for many MPs. I have been told and shown evidence by an overwhelming number of unimpeachably neutral Labour remain staff that Corbyn’s office, for which he must take full responsibility, consistently attempted to weaken and sabotage the Labour remain campaign, in contravention of the party’s official position.

There’s a public Facebook album of screengrabs of xenophobic or racist bullying.

There is much, much more.

The Guardian reports on the hideous fallout of the Brexit vote:

People have been reporting incidents of racism believed to be fuelled by the result of the EU referendum, including alleged racist graffiti and cards reading “no more Polish vermin” posted through letterboxes.

Suspected racist graffiti was found on the front entrance of the Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) in Hammersmith, west London, early on Sunday morning.

…

The incident comes as Cambridgeshire police are investigating reports of racist laminated cards being distributed in Huntingdon on Friday in the hours after the leave result was announced.

According to reports from the Cambridge News, a number of cards saying “Leave the EU/No more Polish vermin” in both English and Polish were found outside St Peter’s school by teaching assistants and students, including an 11-year-old Polish child, who reported they made him feel “really sad”.

Cards bearing the same message were posted around a number of properties, police confirmed.

Baroness Warsi, the former chairwoman of the Conservative party, has warned that since the referendum result was announced immigrants are being stopped in the street and told to leave the country.

“I’ve spent most of the weekend talking to organisations, individuals and activists who work in the area of race hate crime, who monitor hate crime, and they have shown some really disturbing early results from people being stopped in the street and saying look, we voted Leave, it’s time for you to leave,” Warsi told Sky News.

“And they are saying this to individuals and families who have been here for three, four, five generations. The atmosphere on the street is not good.”

I’m hearing the same thing from friends in the UK. It’s as if the vote had been Racism and Xenophobia, yes or no? and the yes vote won.

In Gloucester, Max Fras said he was in a Tesco supermarket on Friday night with his young son when a white man became agitated in the queue for the checkout and began yelling: “This is England now, foreigners have 48 hours to fuck right off. Who is foreign here? Anyone foreign?”

Fras said the man began quizzing people in the queue about where they were from. “He pointed at another gentleman in front of him and said: ‘Where are you from, are you Spanish? Are you Italian? Are you Romanian?’ And he said ‘No, I’m English’,” said Fras.

Lucky for him. Max Fras on the other hand is Polish. The Guardian doesn’t say if he and his young son were ordered to disclose their place of origin.

Other reports of racist incidents believed to be fuelled by the Brexit result, were posted on social media, including one from Heaven Crawley, a research professor at Coventry University, about an incident allegedly witnessed by her daughter in Birmingham.

“This evening my daughter left work in Birmingham and saw [a] group of lads corner a Muslim girl shouting ‘Get out, we voted leave’,” she posted on Twitter.

Welsh businesswoman and remain campaigner Shazia Awan was told by Warren Faulkner to pack her bags and go home after she expressed disappointment in the leave result. Awan, who was born in the UK, tweeted a reply that in her view the “campaign was vile and racist” and had “ruined [the] country forever”.

Earlier that day, Faulkner had celebrated the referendum result as a “major victory for the right wing, adding: “Oi Muslims pack your bags”.

Many of the reports of incidents seem to show the mistaken belief that EU citizens living in the UK will be forced to leave the country as a result of the referendum result, with instances reported of a Polish woman being told to get off a bus and “get packing”, of a Polish man being told at an airport that he “shouldn’t still be here, that we had voted to be rid of people like him”, of a Polish coffee shop worker being jeered at and told “you’re going home now” and of Polish children at a primary school crying because they were scared of getting deported from Britain.

They include a tweeted photo:

A guy in a T shirt that reads: YES! WE WON! NOW SEND THEM BACK

Channel 4 journalist Ciaran Jenkins said that while reporting from Barnsley on Friday in the hours after the referendum results were announced, he overheard three different people shout “send them home” in five minutes.

A man wrote on Twitter that he had experienced two “racialised altercations” in the 10 hours after the referendum result, which he believed were connected to it. One alleged incident involved men chanting “Out, out, out” at Muslim women and in another he said a man at King’s Cross station “yells ‘Brexit’ in my south Asian friend’s face”.

And on and on.

I wonder when Kristallnacht will be.

Guest post by Pieter Droogendijk, originally on Facebook.

It’s a particular kind of person that calls for leaving the E.U, and congratulates the U.K. for doing so. Lots of labels have been used to describe them. Racists, bigots, isolationists, xenophobes, whatever. They may be some of those, or even most of those, but not one of them describes everyone.

But there is one label that describes them all:

Nationalist.

This post by Tom Short has 32,504 shares on Facebook at the moment – by the time you look it will be more. Thoughtful friends of mine have shared it. It’s interesting.

If Boris Johnson looked downbeat yesterday, that is because he realises that he has lost.

Perhaps many Brexiters do not realise it yet, but they have actually lost, and it is all down to one man: David Cameron.

With one fell swoop yesterday at 9:15 am, Cameron effectively annulled the referendum result, and simultaneously destroyed the political careers of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and leading Brexiters who cost him so much anguish, not to mention his premiership.

How?

Throughout the campaign, Cameron had repeatedly said that a vote for leave would lead to triggering Article 50 straight away. Whether implicitly or explicitly, the image was clear: he would be giving that notice under Article 50 the morning after a vote to leave. Whether that was scaremongering or not is a bit moot now but, in the midst of the sentimental nautical references of his speech yesterday, he quietly abandoned that position and handed the responsibility over to his successor.

And as the day wore on, the enormity of that step started to sink in: the markets, Sterling, Scotland, the Irish border, the Gibraltar border, the frontier at Calais, the need to continue compliance with all EU regulations for a free market, re-issuing passports, Brits abroad, EU citizens in Britain, the mountain of legistlation to be torn up and rewritten … the list grew and grew.

The referendum result is not binding. It is advisory. Parliament is not bound to commit itself in that same direction.

The Conservative party election that Cameron triggered will now have one question looming over it: will you, if elected as party leader, trigger the notice under Article 50?

Who will want to have the responsibility of all those ramifications and consequences on his/her head and shoulders?

Boris Johnson knew this yesterday, when he emerged subdued from his home and was even more subdued at the press conference. He has been out-maneouvered and check-mated.

If he runs for leadership of the party, and then fails to follow through on triggering Article 50, then he is finished. If he does not run and effectively abandons the field, then he is finished. If he runs, wins and pulls the UK out of the EU, then it will all be over – Scotland will break away, there will be upheaval in Ireland, a recession … broken trade agreements. Then he is also finished. Boris Johnson knows all of this. When he acts like the dumb blond it is just that: an act.

The Brexit leaders now have a result that they cannot use. For them, leadership of the Tory party has become a poison chalice.

When Boris Johnson said there was no need to trigger Article 50 straight away, what he really meant to say was “never”. When Michael Gove went on and on about “informal negotiations” … why? why not the formal ones straight away? … he also meant not triggering the formal departure. They both know what a formal demarche would mean: an irreversible step that neither of them is prepared to take.

All that remains is for someone to have the guts to stand up and say that Brexit is unachievable in reality without an enormous amount of pain and destruction, that cannot be borne. And David Cameron has put the onus of making that statement on the heads of the people who led the Brexit campaign.

Nick Cohen says pay attention to the lies.

I am not going to be over-dainty about mendacity. Politicians, including Remain politicians lie, as do the rest of us. But not since Suez has the nation’s fate been decided by politicians who knowingly made a straight, shameless, incontrovertible lie the first plank of their campaign. Vote Leave assured the electorate it would reclaim a supposed £350m Brussels takes from us each week. They knew it was a lie. Between them, they promised to spend £111bn on the NHS, cuts to VAT and council tax, higher pensions, a better transport system and replacements for the EU subsidies to the arts, science, farmers and deprived regions. When boring experts said that, far from being rich, we would face a £40bn hole in our public finances, Vote Leave knew how to fight back. In Johnsonian fashion, it said that the truth tellers were corrupt liars in Brussels’ pocket.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells at the New Yorker raises the possibility that has me clutching the blankets in fear.

The question this ultimately raises is whether nationalism is really the fever and liberalism the normal condition, or whether it might be the other way around. In France, Nicolas Sarkozy’s party of the center-right and Marine Le Pen’s party of the nationalist far-right are leading early polling for next year’s Presidential election, with the parties of the left and center-left trailing well behind. In the U.K., the majority of voters now appear to be more nationalist than David Cameron’s Tories were. The Tories have become Boris Johnson’s party, and even further to the right there is the ascendant United Kingdom Independence Party. The worry is that liberalism may be winning the ideas festivals and losing the elections. The left still exists, at least in some form, but liberals seem endangered. Not long ago, we thought the reverse was true.

We think of fascism as the derangement and liberal democracy as the steady state…but as Wallace-Wells says, maybe it’s the opposite.

I talked about that yesterday in my column for The Freethinker.

We know from history that people can take inspiration from demagogues like Trump, and we know what kind of horrors ensue.

I try to derive some consolation from the thought that we’re all getting a Living History lesson – hey girls and boys, this is what it was like in Germany around 1929 or so! Now do you get a sense of how an advanced country like Germany, with a famous philosopher on every corner, managed to let itself be seduced by a screaming mediocrity like Hitler?

Now do you see how in just a few short years they were looking hard in the other direction while the SS pushed most of the Jews in Europe into gas chambers? Now does it seem less baffling to you that Yugoslavia could collapse into a genocidal nightmare practically overnight? Now do you feel with your own fingers how very thin and weak the barrier is between a functioning society and a howling wilderness of murder and torture?

I know I do.

The New Yorker puts it very aptly:

The artist is Barry Blitt.

Jim Al-Khalili on Twitter:

Sad and shocked this morning. Presumably as an immigrant I should hand my job back to whoever it is I took it from. A victory for xenophobia

Some replies:

Phoenix on the Right ‏@BigButterNutJoe 5 hours ago
@jimalkhalili You should absolutely leave. What kind of Brit has a last name like Al-Khalili? Your people have a home.

TJWP ‏@Hriob_Zagel 5 hours ago
TJWP Retweeted
Well with an attitude like that you should probably leave since you don’t seem to support the county to begin with. https://twitter.com/jimalkhalili/status/746207671515123714 …

Randolph Carter ‏@occidissident 5 hours ago
Randolph Carter Retweeted
That’s a start. Then self-deportation. Take your skill set and benefit your own country, your own people #brexit https://twitter.com/jimalkhalili/status/746207671515123714 …

Brittany StGermain ‏@brittykittybrat 5 hours ago
@jimalkhalili Maybe if immigrants showed more respect to their “foster” countries instead of trying to bring what they “ran” from…hmmmmmmm

Spectre ✘ ‏@SpectreRedux 5 hours ago
Spectre ✘ Retweeted
Yes. And then get the fuck out. Go home, kebab. https://twitter.com/jimalkhalili/status/746207671515123714 …

Welcome to Farage’s Britain.

The Washington Post shares a depressing fact:

Awakening to a stock market plunge and a precipitous decline in the value of the pound that Britain hasn’t seen in more than 30 years, voters now face a series of economic shocks that analysts say will only worsen before they improve. The consequences of the leave vote will be felt worldwide, even here in the United States, and some British voters say they now regret casting a ballot in favor of Brexit.

“Even though I voted to leave, this morning I woke up and I just — the reality did actually hit me,” one woman told the news channel ITV News. “If I’d had the opportunity to vote again, it would be to stay.”

Hmm. So she voted on the basis of non-reality? Fantasy then?

Bad move.

That confusion over what Brexit might mean for the country’s economy appears to have been reflected across the United Kingdom on Thursday. Google reported sharp upticks in searches not only related to the ballot measure but also about basic questions concerning the implications of the vote. At about 1 a.m. Eastern time, about eight hours after the polls closed, Google reported that searches for “what happens if we leave the EU” had more than tripled.

Brilliant. Just fucking brilliant. The time to do that was eight hours before the polls closed, not after. Before before before.

I’m seeing this all over Facebook:

#Brexit – A Still Life pic.twitter.com/lRrDhP14up

— William Gould (@willgupshup) June 24, 2016

I actually remember that Britain, the one that had never heard of quiche or hummus or gelato, the one where “baked” beans on toast was considered an acceptable meal.

Cornwall voted to leave but hey don’t take away its EU subsidy ok?

The Cornish council has issued a plea for “protection” following the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union.

Cornwall, which has a poor economy and as such has received millions of pounds in subsidies from the EU each year for over a decade, voted decisively to Leave.

But this money is now threatened following the severing of ties with the EU.

Well it would be, wouldn’t it.

John Pollard, the leader of Cornwall council said: “Now that we know the UK will be leaving the EU we will be taking urgent steps to ensure that the UK Government protects Cornwall’s position in any negotiations.

“We will be insisting that Cornwall receives investment equal to that provided by the EU programme which has averaged £60m per year over the last ten years.”

I see. And by the same token we all want to pay zero tax while still collecting all possible subsidies and benefits.

But a statement on the council website posted on Friday said prior to the referendum said the county was reassured by the Leave side that withdrawing from the EU would not affect the funding already allocated by Brussels.

Leave campaigners also promised the county would not be worse off in terms of the investment it receives. “We are seeking urgent confirmation from Ministers that this is the case,” the statement added.

So the county assumed the Leave side was telling it the truth?

Bad move.

In 2014, Jonathan Lindsell, author of a report on industries benefit from the EU, told the Western Morning News: “Cornwall is a major beneficiary of EU spending so if Britain were to leave then the Treasury would have to take great care in ensuring its local economy was not crippled as a result.

“Not only do Cornwall’s many farmers and fishermen benefit from the Common Agricultural Policy and Common Fisheries Policy respectively, but the county receives tens of millions of pounds a year in structural and convergence funds to support local economic growth and communities.

“In the 2014-2020 budget, Cornwall has been allocated 592 million euros from the convergence fund to assist with further development. If Britain leaves the EU before 2020 the government should seriously consider keeping this fund up.”

Oh well – at least they gave those filthy foreigners a good poke in the eye.

Some reactions:

Onjali Rauf:

Woke up with a gasp…that still hasn’t ended. Am in mourning for a UK that once was and will never again be. The rhetoric of racism has won. Lessons of the past ignored. And the future security of our human rights laws, our ability to tackle our government on injustices, and the EU funds which have helped thousands of charities survive to do our government’s dirty work, is in jeopardy. Oh Britain…what have you done?

Bill Cooke:

It’s a sad day for Britain, and for the world. Britons have voted for a myth of Camelot that never existed. We’ve shat on the future of the young generation, who supported Remain by 3 votes to 4. We’ve voted to have a recession. We’ve voted to be less significant in the world. And we’ve probably broken up the United Kingdom. Great way to ‘take back control’ guys.

Ishtiaq Ahmed:

Britons decide to leave the European Union,

So, finally the British people have expressed their choice. The European Union has been a great experiment in peace building and economic prosperty but now nationalism has struck back. I am afraid we are all going to see such a backlash in the rest of the EU.

Britain created a world empire and rule over several continents but now when power is to be shared with others in the European Union they want to separate.

Reminds me of the Muslim League’s stand that in a democracy the Muslims would be in a minority so we want a separate state – FOR THE 7 CENTURIES THE SAME ASHRAF ELITE only wanted to expand as much as they could in India but when it came to democracy they wanted separatism. The British attitude is the same.