Why is anti-establishment sentiment thriving even after Brexit?

Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

There was quite a gloating article in the Guardian this week on Brexit and its consequences on the rest of Europe. In a nutshell, it said that Europe had been revolted by the self-harm the UK has inflicted on itself and the instability it has unleashed on the British economy, its politics and society in general. Despite its "I told you so" theme, it is not wrong. But the battle for the soul of Britain has been hijacked by two opposing factions: the rich on one side and the poor on the other, with paradoxically the poor unwittingly doing the bidding of those who would like to subjugate them. Anti-establishment fever tilted the vote towards Brexit, not a genuine desire to leave the EU.

Oh David Cameron, what have you unleashed? In fact, I could replace the former Prime Minister in that sentence with a number of people, like the present incumbent (whoever that is at the time you read this), or maybe a few media moguls. But this all goes back decades. It is a seething collection of pustules that has been awaiting its time to spew its fetid contents all over the skin of public life and drag the victim into a chronic downward spiral of health and well-being.

There is a correlation between the Brexit vote and the current malaise in society - let me explain...

Successive governments have run public services into the ground through cutting costs, economy drives and selling off tenders to the private sector. None of this needed to happen if it were not for ideology-driven politicians whether in national government or local councils, and their chums in the private sector from lobbyists to energy conglomerates, pharmaceutical companies to building contractors. Every one of them is partly to blame for the current situation. The situation is clear: for the last 40 years, cheap is best, and to hell with the consequences. Hospitals and health workers, infrastructure building, public hygiene, education facilities and staff, police, firefighters, the military, even libraries, have been affected by the scything down of their expenses all so that governments, councils and their contractors can say to their clients (that's you), that they have been saving money in your name.

Well I don't know about you, but as far as I am aware, it's the exact opposite of that method that leads to good running of public services. Money needs to be put into their systems, not removed. That means that instead of reducing our income tax bills, VAT payments and council charges, the powers that be should be raising them, or at least looking for ways to maximise returns. When some suited chinless wonder from the richer side of public life comes on TV and warns against voting for various politicians because "your bills will go up", people need to remember that this bozo from the landed gentry is actually worried about his own costs going up. He will be the first to see a reduction in his own income because he is earning more per year than most earn in ten or twenty years. Why is Jeremy Corbyn being picked out for special treatment? Precisely because of that. He wants public services to run properly and rich dudes fear that if they do, not only will they lose money, they'll lose the opportunity to buy into them when lobbyists have finished convincing politicians to sell.

Back in the 1980s, public services were run into the ground until the public clamour to sell those services off was so loud, that this was the most logical step. It was a tactic used time and again by the then government to make the case for its sale. This was true for water, energy, gas, telephony, public transport, even security services. What we saw, though, was a change in the accountability and rights of those public services, now they were private. Trains that were before late or didn't show up at all were blamed on strikes and militant worker-related action, whereas now the services are not much better and in some cases worse, despite being sold off. Outsourcing and selling off public services has led us nowhere, except that now those services need no longer be directly accountable to the government, and ultimately, the public. It also gives carte blanche to those companies to limit pay, reduce workers' rights and entitlements, all in the name of saving money. They have effectively written themselves out of any social responsibility.

It is this selfish ideology that has led to this moment in history (and yes, this is history - PhD theses will be written about this period in the not-too-distant future) where the gap between rich and poor has finally become too wide, and where injustice in society has become plain for all to see where once it was easier to sweep it aside with gimmicks and distractions, fobbing people off with standard soundbites and impersonal press releases.

And things are a lot more complicated than on the face of it. Far from being a country that's full to bursting, as landowners, right-wing politicians and lobbyists will tell you, there is plenty of room. Indeed, only a very small percentage of the land has been built on. The real issue is that it is a country whose infrastructure has not been invested in for a very long time, and citizens' roles in society are becoming less and less welcome, and it shows:

• the hospitals are maybe fully equipped, but many times there are staff shortages or there are not enough beds for patients, leading to dangerously long waiting times. If real investment were made to ensure there were enough fully-staffed hospitals for everyone, we would need to delve deep into our pockets 
• you should send your child to a local school no matter its ranking, meaning that pupils are liable to be turned down if their parents try to apply for a place in what might be a more suitable school outside their catchment area, even if it is just over a designated line. This means house prices in certain areas rise, and the rules prevent any logic from being used. The fallout from this is that people are being forced to do irrational things to get their children into the school of their choice
• the Royal Navy, once the envy of the world, is now a shadow of itself, as is the British Army and the Royal Air Force, all so the defence budget can be spent on a nuclear arsenal that nobody dare use
• there is a huge swathe of building land that is lying unused and empty because building companies refuse to build on it, meaning prices of houses go spiralling up, but more shockingly, their untouched land turns them a huge profit

There are many more examples of this, and people have become sick and tired of being treated like commodities. They know that successive governments have cut everything to the bone, they know the country is dangerously paired back to the very limits of manageability, they just haven't joined all the dots yet, but they are slowly becoming aware of it. 

Having an ideology of saving money for the sake of it has proven recently to be a myth that has badly exposed the long-term dangers of such recklessness in playing with people's dignity and respect, and nowhere has that been more evident than in the case of Grenfell Tower in West London. What has struck me is how someone came up with the idea of saving a few thousand measly pounds by choosing an inferior cladding material in a refurbishment project to make the outside of a tower block more aesthetically pleasing while neglecting the inside, where residents - who are human beings, by the way - live.

The sentiment of grief turned to anger very quickly, leading to a general feeling of ill-will towards the Prime Minister, the government, Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council, and various contracting firms. This is not surprising, but it is a microcosm of UK life in general. The protests we saw in Whitehall and at Kensington Town Hall are just a spit in the ocean of general British dissatisfaction with the way life is going at the moment, and this is manifesting itself in so many ways.

The Brexit referendum last year, in my opinion, was won by a three-way split between different sections of the public: 

• easily-led individuals who believe everything that the right-wing press tells them, as well as unadventurous, stay-at-home monolinguals who know nothing about the wider world except the two-week drunken jaunt they undertake every summer to some touristic Mediterranean concrete jungle
• people with vested interests in pulling out of the EU, such as some unscrupulous employers, financial investors and politicians, who have been heavily sponsored to say negative things about the EU, and finally
• genuinely disaffected, forgotten and ignored people all around the country who wanted to vote for a change and saw it as their way to stage a protest; effectively kicking the government where it hurts for their constant overlooking of their issues (it is these people I can forgive for voting the way they did - so would I, probably)

What the last group fails to realise, is that by voting the way they did, they have done exactly what the people who are profiting from making their lives a misery wanted them to do; that is to say, they are turkeys voting for Christmas, which makes this such a national tragedy. There is also a gap between the educated and the under-educated, leading to a startling decline in trust in true facts and expert opinions, and a worrying rise in people's willingness to tie their misery to any popular movement that will get them out of the terrible hole they are in, whether that be extremist religion, militant political organisations, support groups, pressure groups or general grumbling to mates at the pub. Brexit had very little to do with many people's actual wishes and more to do with a genuine national mood of dissatisfaction with their circumstances.

What the UK needs right now is a long healing process and a coming to terms with the fact that the people have been lied to for many years for profit and nothing more. The recent election on 9th June reflected people's mistrust of the current incumbents and their handling of social matters as well as Brexit negotiations, where even the Daily Mail has revealed that 69% of people favour a softer departure from the EU. People need to regain a modicum of trust in their politicians and their public services.

Anti-establishment sentiment is thriving in lots of little pockets like local issues, or even as a cause of adverse personal experiences with authority, but when the dots get joined up and everyone realises that it is a national issue, there will be a mass protest at the gates of the high and mighty. People just don't realise yet who is to blame, but this is slowly revealing itself now that people see that cuts in services and selling out to corporate greed have led to the situation we find ourselves in the early summer of 2017.

If you want nice roses, you do not cut at the bottom.

One thing the 99% needs to understand - we're all guilty

Those people all over the world protesting about the current greed and monumental corruption at the heart of the failed capitalist system have many stories to tell: the graduate from Milwaukee who, four years ago, was promised a gold-plated job when she got her degree and now has to work for tips in a downtown diner, the promises all but broken, the prospects all but dried up; the builder from Missouri, who was given a loan to take on a few new employees and broaden the business, and now has to lay them off because nobody can afford houses any more and so there is no work for them; the 57-year-old metalworker from Portland who has just discovered his company has been taken over by an Asian firm and he has been told he is no longer employable because he is too old despite his 35-year experience and the new company has changed the pension rules overnight under its own country's laws, not those of the US, and the office worker from Boston, who discovers that his house may be repossessed whilst he has been on a two-day sick leave because despite being told he was financially capable of maintaining the monthly repayments, two of the four companies he has to work for over his seven-day week to pay for his lifestyle have had to lay off staff, starting with those who have cost the companies money through social security or lost hours.

There are hundreds of thousands of more examples like this - some you feel more sorry for than others; some you want to box their ears for being so gullible. What I find most alarming is the serene aloofness we witness from the politicians. They seem to feel that they are part of a different world. And in some ways, however falsely, they are. They come on the television and give rousing interviews that they are right and everyone else is wrong, or like in the UK, they dismiss the whole thing as being the wrong way to show their feelings (what should they do? Write a letter to their local radio station?). This week, politicians of many countries and persuasions will meet somewhere to "discuss" the "turmoil" in the markets and to flagellate Greece a little bit more than the week before. They will stay in top-notch hotels with excellent facilities and eat first-class food served by the area's best chefs. There will be little in the way to suggest that they are even remotely aware of the events in Madrid, New York, London and Rome. Or that they even care. They believe the silent majority will be there at the end to maintain the status quo. That silent majority, who so stoically say "tsk-tsk" at both the politicians and the protesters for being so (violent / unresponsive / reactionary / incompetent - delete as appropriate) and who have been too easily spoiled by wealth to concern themselves with mundane things like the world in 2020.

It is a perfectly balanced conundrum, and as it stands, there is no chance of revolution. I think, in our heart of hearts, we do not want a revolution on the scale of Robespierre's France or Lenin's Russia, just a sense that we're living within our means once again and we're not being lied to by big business and their political stooges. One thing I noticed in the recent Liam Fox scandal engulfing the Conservative Party in the UK government is that the donors to the Conservative Party are angry because he misused their money to take himself and his mate Adam Werritty off on VIP trips to visit various politicians around the world. This is shocking. Firstly, that he misused their money, but secondly, and most importantly, that we are supposed to feel sorry for the donors because Fox and Werritty spent the money they were supposed to be using to promote the clandestine agendas of those corporate enterprises, on pampering themselves in 5-star hotels.

When we start focusing purely on the politicians for being corrupt and fail to notice that in fact the donors are the ones we should be most concerned about, despite it being in the headlines in 2-inch-high letters, we know we've been had in one monumental cover-up. It's there for us to see, yet the politician takes the blame on behalf of his corporate masters. How dare the corporates think they can run roughshod over democracy by buying off politicians? And how dare the politicians allow themselves to be used as pawns by big business? We are being tricked by the men in suits. But we allow it. And they paint all the protesters as anarchists, because they are the most visible ones on television despite there being an overwhelming majority of peaceful protesters, all victims of the lies and incompetence of the money men. They are lying to all of us by re-arranging the truth into a convenient illusion through dressing the corporate kleptomania, moving to a less expensive part of the world and sinister tie-up deals as "responsible" business practice and being "responsible" to their shareholders, when in fact it is ruthless expansionism and sharp-elbowed profiteering to the detriment of the very people they rely upon for profit. Why is it, that in many Western countries, house prices going up in price is good news? We are told that. But it is just another way for big business to get a larger slice of the pie from us. And the silent majority just say "tsk-tsk".

Don't get me wrong - I'm not a conspiracy theorist, nor have I ever voted for a party with red in its logo. I am just looking through my own eyes. We allow this to happen, because we just say "tsk-tsk" at everything and expect those who got us into this mess to get us out again. Until we realise that there is much, much more to do than whistle through our teeth over our morning coffee and watch satirical shows for the latest spin on the week's events, the politicians will carry on covering their tracks and big business will carry on excreting on the rest of us.

Thinking about conspiracy theories, I remember back 15 to 20 years ago, when the fledgling Internet was a burble of vague messages between similar groups of academics and the crazed fantasies of paranoid conspiracy theorists - yet now, remembering back, many of those witterings are not far from the truth, despite the less-than-erudite manner in which they went about conveying their messages. I remember a very early one, which said the economies of Western Europe would collapse because they would converge currencies without thinking of the consequences of monetary union without political union. It was written in the style of a crazed American academic who had been fired for having a vision that nobody wanted to believe. That feeling of being vindicated will not be sweet at all, considering the gravity of the events surrounding it.

Finally, it needs to be said that the press and media need to be careful of the words they use to describe the protesters, as although there are anarchists mixed in, there are a great number of ordinary people. And although I truly admire anyone for sitting in the cold, damp squares of Western cities for weeks on end for a political and social message they truly believe in conveying to the lords and masters of this world, the reptilian coldness and stoic business-as-usual attitude of those sitting in the VIP suites of the world's most expensive hotels can only remain whilst we the silent majority do nothing about it other than say, "tsk-tsk".

Should Rome have a monopoly on beatification?

Yesterday Princess Diana would have become 46 years of age but for the tragic events of 31st August 1997, which brought speechlessness to usually stoic BBC newsreaders, a lump to the throat of the then Prime Minister Tony Blair, a silent response from the Royal Family and a mass outpouring of grief from the general public. Ordinary people flew around the world to be at her funeral, world leaders sat among charity workers and hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets in an unprecedented (and unrepeatable) act of togetherness which made London the temporary epicentre of the world.

I was there too. All night. How could I miss such an event if I was only half an hour away by train?

I remember it well, and I don't regret one sleepless second of it. I met two friends of mine, Marketa from the Czech Republic and Anne from France and together we had a hot drink at one of the plethora of cafés which stayed open to feed the world the night before. It was one of the only times in history where London was crimeless, apart from the odd pickpocket and shameless flower peddlar. By midnight the streets looked like Disney had recreated a life-size sellout car-free London themepark - in London itself. We walked around bewondering the immensity of it all, the sheer numbers camping out along the streets, in the parks, in doorways of offices.

A little after, we found ourselves outside the HQ itself: Buckingham Palace. It was here that we chose to spend the remainder of the night. When we arrived there were relatively few people, and we chose to sit beside a musician strumming ballads on his guitar. Let us not forget, that week had been a week where most people in the city had not really gone to work. They mostly couldn't face it. But there were more people in the capital that night than at any time of the working week. But here we were quite alone at the Victoria Memorial. As the playing went on, more and more people came to join, sing along, sway, hold hands or simply listen. By about 2, we must have numbered sixty or more. The pagans celebrate the circle as a symbol of protection, a forcefield against the outside evil forces. And there we were on the greatest circle of them all, emotionally vulnerable but as a group indestructable. We all shared our food and drink together like some new form of communion. I brought a bottle of Becherovka to keep the chill away, Marketa had some sandwiches with her and Anne had a neat little picnic. I had some tortilla española, Polish vodka, North African unleavened bread and Hungarian salami from the assorted members of the human race who, just for that night, were together as they would never be again.

We sang "Candle In The Wind" and other soulful songs when the music stopped for a second. Someone (it might even have been me) recommended singing the National Anthem. If I remember rightly, there was no hesitation. Someone started us off and then the lot of us rose to our feet and belted it out twice. I was impressed how many foreigners knew the words. As we were nearing the end of the Anthem, a light came on in the Palace. I will never forget that moment. It felt as if Her Majesty the Queen herself were saying, "Don't worry, I'm here." Of course, it might have just been a security guard checking the rooms or the Queen Mother getting up to adjust her colostomy bag, or the Duke of Edinburgh looking for his shotgun, but at the time it felt like She was giving us her blessing.

The time passed quickly and the sun soon started to make its arrival imminent. It was going to be a glorious high summer morning. The puddles from recent rain had vanished and the constant sound of all of London's humanity murmuring had reduced to a dawn lull. It was then that we headed off to Hyde Park, where we wanted to watch the funeral on the large screens the BBC had, in her time-honoured fashion, selflessly placed in various open spaces around the city. I have so much to thank the BBC for over the years, but that is for a future article. The three of us, who had been unusually quiet overnight, headed off hurriedly to acquire a good position somewhere near the biggest screen in London.

I thought we would be too late, but we alloted ourselves a prime place a hundred metres back from the screen, and BBC News had already started broadcasting there to keep us occupied while we awaited what I would quite rationally and realistically call the world's greatest funeral since Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi. And maybe including his too. People from the sixties talk about the Kennedy Moment (that everyone knows what they were doing when they heard JFK was assassinated), well I'm sure the Diana Moment surpassed even that. This was a woman who was even known by some remote tribes of the rain forests, who even got airtime on North Korean television (North Korean TV is well known for providing news rather belatedly, and showed a thirty-minute highlights programme of the Football World Cup in 1998 two months after the event - if the BBC did that there would be a lot of letters!).

We sat there around the other people sharing more food out watching coverage of the early morning events, pundits and correspondents telling us what others were doing around the world, famous people reminiscing about their moments with Diana, or charity workers talking about her visits, presenters informing us of the schedule. We watched as the gentry filed into Westminster Abbey and the world's leaders arrived with their escorts and bodyguards. At exactly the right time, the soldiers opened the gates and out came the gun carriage, normally associated with great war leaders, like Churchill, Nelson or Wellington, this time paradoxically for a princess of peace.

Behind her came the royal accompaniment. Brave boys William and Harry looking like men far before their time, bemused, bewildered, betrayed; her brother Earl Spencer hardly able to walk, dignified with his head held high; Prince Charles looking like a startled fish out of water; the Duke of Edinburgh completing the lineup. It was like an identification parade at a police station. Which one of these three men was the perpetrator? Apparently Prince Charles had spent the week roaming around the hills of Scotland feeling full of guilt and self-recrimination. The two boys had been obviously protected from the press because they had not been seen all week. Earl Spencer had occupied himself with the banalities of the administration.

As they entered into the London streets, a small group of hysterical individuals started wailing and throwing rose petals at the coffin. We started to wonder if that was going to be the precedent, but fortunately the rest passed off with dignity. As they progressed along towards Hyde Park, the thousands of people in the vicinity of the southern side of the space rushed towards the roadside to catch a glimpse of her passing. We three followed the wave towards the road barriers, the only empty area of streetside barricades until we arrived en masse. This was the only, rarest and strangest moment of excitement we had had in the fifteen hours we had been in London. We were all, without exception, there to see her. The only time I saw the Princess of Wales was in a coffin. I barely looked at the others, transfixed by her alone, even after death. The feeling of seeing her was enough fulfillment and we all processed back to our abandoned picnic places, rucksacks and foldable chairs, which were, of course, all still there, untouched. That was a day when even the thieves took a day off.

As she approached the final part of her journey to the Abbey, the bell of the tower was rung a pre-calculated number of times. Precisely upon the final stroke of the bell, the military stopped at the entrance. It was one of a string of impressive events of that day. Not least what was to happen next. The music which accompanied her up the aisle of the Abbey was so impressive, repressive, oppressive, that it was the moment even the stoniest of hearts let their tears flow. I was losing litres through my eyes and was not ashamed. Most of the funeral was a blur of hypocritical religious mumbo-jumbo which the princess would have had to accept simply because it was her funeral.

Then Sir Elton John stepped up to the piano and sang "Candle In The Wind", a song originally dedicated to Marilyn Monroe but rather controversially re-worded for Diana. Most people thought "Your Song" to be more appropriate, including the proxy-assassins at the tabloid newspapers, as that was genuinely one of her favourite songs and the reason why Sir Elton was there at all.

Earl Spencer climbed the stairs of the pulpit and began his eulogy, perhaps in time seen as the defining moment of the day and which made the shortlist of the Guardian's Great Speeches of the Twentieth Century, where he joins a line-up of great men and women like Sir Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King and Jawaharlal Nehru.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/greatspeeches/story/0,,2060134,00.html

As his pained words flowed out, rising above his shaken voice, the world sat transfixed at the eloquence, simplicity and raw power of his speech. He did not hold in his grief. He spoke for everyone and did not revert to hidden messages. And then people were no longer sitting. They were standing all over London, applauding. The growing applause dopplered its way towards the doors of the Abbey and then inside that formal, stuffy sanctum where it brought dignitaries out of protocol, also clapping probably embarrassed to be seen not to, just how Diana would have liked it. Although the rest of the funeral was a typical royal ceremony, those moments were unforgettable. As the service finished, people drifted back to normality, back to the pubs, cafés and railway stations. Reality set in, paradoxically bringing the solidarity shown before crashing to the ground as cars, buses, even white vans, reclaimed their positions as the city's chief noisemakers.

By early afternoon, reality had hit hardest on my own energy levels, artificially pumped up for that most surreal night and saddest of mornings. We three went our separate ways and I took one of the extra trains provided to carry British citizens out of London, dawdled aimlessly in a homeward direction and collapsed in my bed, despite the raging sunshine outside. I slept in a way I had not been able to all week - finally in the most peaceful of circumstances.

You are now wondering why I chose that title. It was playing on my mind yesterday while watching the concert for Diana at Wembley Stadium, the home of modern folklore. Despite the film "The Queen", which did no favours to Diana and virtually turned her into a manic depressive, manipulative little maid, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. She surely became depressed and fairly unpopular in The House due to how she was treated, although I don't think she did herself many favours. I am sure she was tricked into marrying Charles, whom she loved dearly despite his lack of amorous advances. Once she had produced an heir, a handsome successor, she was surplus to requirements, although she could have been a much more admired figure in the royal household if she had Played The Game. But that wasn't her style. She hated all the formalities and protocols. When she went on holiday to Klosters with Sarah Ferguson and the four children once, the tabloid press lambasted her and especially "Fergie" for "giggling like schoolgirls" and behaving like ordinary people, not super-royals. What did they expect? That they would ski in golden boots and go to bed at nine?

And for this reason I believe we have seen exactly how a Messiah could have been manufactured for us 2000 years ago. When you see the photos of Diana shaking hands with leprosy sufferers, AIDS patients, terminally ill children; when she walks in landmine clearance zones, visits youth theatres, takes her boys to a theme park and makes them queue up with the rest, this rings a very familiar bell. It is now, in her death, that she is the humble member of the royalty who was one of the people. All the television documentary witnesses, like the parents of terminally ill patients, right up to ex-presidents, queued up to tell of how she touched their lives so readily, how she was the true divinity which saved their hospital from closing, or which got crucial publicity for their plight in the media, or which lit up the face of a dying boy. Didn't some Jewish man do similar things two thousand years before?

For People's Princess read King of the Jews, for Queen of Hearts, read Lamb of God. We are getting ourselves a secular saint. Would this be the example of how the story of Jesus Christ was purveyed, embellished with a few miracles and urban myths? Don't forget, in those days, in order to Big Someone Up, they had to have performed some mighty things. That meant even if they were bending reality, like being able to walk on water, knowing where a huge shoal of fish was and performing life-saving surgery on your friend's daughter, this meant the person was great.

I see nothing wrong in making legends out of mere mortals, but I see a great moral corruption in turning the tabloid press (who never gave her a moment's peace) into the pharisees, the royal biographers as the Gospel writers, Britain into Judea, and the individuals she met into the Lazaruses, lepers and disciples. But this seems to be what is happening. A new phase in the rehabilitation, a beatification from the masses. I truly believe there are individuals who deserve special status in our respect, who we should try to emulate, but we are also in danger of allowing ourselves to be thrust back into a new religion just as we are finally rejecting them.