Reasons not to despair yet

Well. My first reaction when I woke in the night and heard the news was a rather cowardly thought that I should take down the blog post I put up yesterday afternoon.  Certainly, as far as predictions are concerned, I ought to hand in my blogging licence.

I leave it up as a testament to my own - what? Stupidity? Naivety? Not sure. Either way, it stays.

And one reason I want it to stay up is that I have a feeling that, within it somewhere, there are the seeds of a more enlightened interpretation of the referendum result.

So let's leave aside the worries that Marine Le Pen has congratulated the British. And let's not blame Jean-Claude Juncker for his boneheaded "no more reform" on the eve of the poll (Brussels has a great deal to answer for, after all). We can leave all that for another day.

There are three reasons for stepping back from abject despair this morning.

1.  History. If you look at English history, there are moments - over and over again - when we break from mainstream continental institutions, perhaps most notably when Henry VIII broke with the Pope and went on to privatise the welfare system (dissolve the monasteries). When we sent Philip of Spain's advisors packing from London when Queen Mary died (his wife) in 1558.

When we broke with the French in 1940, largely because they rejected Churchill's call for a merger between our nations - the real, spiritual beginning of the EU - it was also greeted with relief back home.

We similarly rejected cultural unity in broadcasting in 1945, despite winning the wireless war, as I describe in my book V for Victory.

Paradoxically, we don't look back on those moments as national disasters, though they may have seemed so at the time.

2. The paradoxical nature of political change. This is what William Morris wrote in A Dream of John Ball about the grammar of change:

"I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name."

That is the way politics works. When you win, you turn out to lose and vice versa. If the business of Brexit turns out to be a disaster, even just in the next few days, then those who engineered it will pay the price - made to pay, even by those who voted for it and shouted "Traitor!" at their opponents in the street.

3. The signal for the big economic shift. This has been, says Giles Wilkes, the most concrete political reaction to the 2008 banking crisis (though financial speculators seem to be doing pretty well out of it). I think that is true.

I have been blogging for some time about the next big economic model shift, which arrive pretty regularly every 35-40 years. The last one was 1979, so I had been wondering what kind of shock was likely to precipitate the next one. Now we know.

Especially now that the Daily Mail has turned its rage onto the speculators. It seems insane that we should vote for self-determination from political interference but not from economic.

It may be painful, even frightening, but by the end of this process I believe we will have a new economic dispensation which accepts that the benefits of economic success can and must spread to those involved in it - not through the welfare system, but directly in the way economics works. Of course, we will have to wrestle for that, but that is my interpretation of what the vote means.

**

So there we are. Three takes on the emerging crisis which lead me to be less despairing. But let me explain why. 

Because the geography of Brexit is pretty clear, even just to the Lib Dems (the party's new heartlands voted to Remain and its old heartlands to Leave).

Because I have a gut sense that the future belongs to those who interpret this result in the most noble, positive and liberal way - to those who understand that it is not a vote to close us down or cut us off. People will listen to those who grasp this as a revelation of people's higher motivations. For a fairer nation.

I'm a Liberal as well as a liberal and I hope that Tim Farron will move on, see beyond the specific institutions involved and articulate the new liberal world.

See my book on the Southern Railways disaster too, now on sale for £1.99 (10p goes to Railway Benefit Fund).

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