Good robust stuff from Paul Mason:

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.

The shambles of the First World War was memorably satirised by (I think) Alan Clark as “Lions led by donkeys”. Brexit, in those terms, is donkeys led by weasels.

Frank Bruni makes a prediction:

What I’m sure of is a convention like none before it. Many of the sorts of congressional staffers who are typically eager to pitch in will travel to Cleveland only at the insistence of their bosses and under duress. “It is going to resemble a funeral for a relative everyone hates,” one Capitol Hill veteran told me.

Can’t wait.

This is something you won’t hear from either Brexit or Remain camps:

Statistical theory even allows us to quantify how expectations about the US presidential election should shift if Brexit wins in Britain. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that we start by giving equal credibility to opinion polls showing Brexit and Trump with almost 50% support and expert opinions, which gave them only a 25% chance. Now suppose that Brexit wins. A statistical formula called Bayes’ theorem then shows that belief in opinion polls would increase from 50% to 67%, while the credibility of expert opinion would fall from 50% to 33%.

Since bond markets hate uncertainty, you can imagine what happens next.

Lovely Irish Times column by Fintan O’Toole:

Is England ready for self-government? It’s a question that the English used to ask of peoples less obviously made from the right stuff than they are, such as the Indians and the Irish. But it’s time they asked it of themselves.

Brexit is essentially Exit: if the Leave side wins the referendum it will almost certainly be without securing majorities in Scotland or Northern Ireland. For all the talk of reasserting the sovereignty of the United Kingdom, the desire to leave the European Union is driven above all by the rise of English nationalism.

And the chief consequence of Brexit will be the emergence of England as a stand-alone nation. Whatever entity might eventually emerge from a tumultuous breach with the European Union will almost certainly not, in the long term, include Scotland: a second referendum on Scottish independence will be inevitable, and this time Scots would be voting to stay in the EU…

Worth reading in full.

One thing that always astonishes me during election campaigns is the way one’s fellow-citizens appear to have no difficulty holding two contradictory opinions simultaneously. So it is with the current Referendum debate in the UK. A friend who lives in a deeply rural constituency, for example, reports that many of the neighbouring farmers — who are substantial beneficiaries of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy and subsidies flowing therefrom — are determined to vote for Brexit. And so, it seems, is their local Tory MP. In one way, one could see this as wholly admirable: people who are willing to vote for a deeply-held principle, even when doing so goes against their economic interests. But it sure as hell runs counter to the economists’ conception of people as rational economic agents.

I used to think that this capacity to believe two contradictory things at the same time was an instance of what psychologists call ‘cognitive dissonance’. This is a theory of behavioural psychology which says that “people experience uneasiness after acting in a way that appears to conflict with their beliefs and preferences about themselves or others. To minimise that mental discomfort, the theory posits, a person will adapt his or her attitude to better fit with or justify previous actions.”

The only problem with that is that many of the people I’ve met who hold contradictory beliefs don’t seem in the least uneasy. In fact, they appear to be completely relaxed about it.

There’s an interesting piece by Nathan Brooker in today’s Financial Times (sadly behind a paywall) in which he reports on a visit to British ex-pats who have settled in Europe. “Why”, he asks, “are some UK expats voting for Brexit when it could hit their healthcare, pensions and pockets?”

Why indeed? But maybe it is cognitive dissonance at work. The theory, after all, posits that people adopt beliefs that reduce the gap between their contradictory beliefs. If you apply that to Mr Brooker’s ex-pats, it may be that the reason they are pro-Brexit is because, years ago, they made an analogous radical decision to “get out” of the UK. So they want the UK now to make a similar radical break.

Hmmm… Deep waters, Holmes, eh?

LATER This interesting post by Nick Tyrone:

Several areas in London are odds on to be the place that votes to Remain in the EU in the largest numbers. Clacton-on-Sea is odds on to be the place which votes most heavily for Leave. Two things are interesting about this. One, the places in London voting for Remain are the areas most directly affected by EU immigration, i.e. that’s where the EU immigrants live. Meanwhile, Clacton is 95% both white and British born. They blame their woes on immigrants – despite the fact that there are none where they live, and if immigration fell to 0%, it would affect them and their lives 0%.

The second thing that is interesting about the London-Clacton divide is that if we vote to leave the EU, one way or another London will be fine. Either we go for the full course WTO deal, or despite what everyone’s been saying about a Norway deal being off the table that’s what we do in the end anyway, it doesn’t really matter to the capital in the long term. London is London and it will find a way of pulling through, even if the shock is really bad to the system post-Brexit.

It is places like Clacton that will really feel it. If there is a recession, those are the people who won’t be able to suck it up and say it’s temporary; they are barely making it now. If further funds are taken out of benefits, and there’s not even any EU money around for regeneration projects anymore, places like Clacton have nowhere to turn when it turns out a post-Brexit world has simply made regional inequalities even starker.

During the war there were posters in every public place in Britain saying “Careless talk costs lives”. Pondering the savage murder of Jo Cox MP, I wonder if this thought strikes any of the Brexiteers. Or any of the journalists who produce British tabloid newspapers.

Did their careless talk just cost a young mother her life?