Andy Price, Head of Politics, Sheffield Hallam University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Economists Eli Heckscher (1879-1952) and Bertil Ohlin (1899-1979) died more than three decades ago. But it’s fair to assume that neither would have been surprised by the underlying causes of Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, or Brexit for that matter. 

Their Heckscher-Ohlin (H-O) model of international trade – developed at the Stockholm School of Economics in the 1930s – clearly predicted today’s middle-class discontent bellowing at the ballot box. 
The two Swedes recognised the simple but too-often-overlooked soft underbelly of global trade and growth: prosperity doesn’t distribute evenly. And workers in bustling export industries benefit at the expense of those who face foreign competition

 

Without trade, the United States produces more high-tech goods and consumers pay a lower relative price for them than in China. But here is the important point: in the US, the wages of high-skilled workers are lower than in China. Not lower in absolute but in relative terms. 

Great programmers in the US are handsomely rewarded because the country can export the goods and services they produce. If Apple, Uber or Facebook could sell and operate only in the US, the demand for high-skill workers would be much lower than it is today, and the country’s lower-skilled labor force would not face such strong competition from abroad. 

With trade, low-tech goods become relatively cheaper in the US. But, critically, people who work in low-tech industries there face the prospect of lower wages, even if the overall price of goods and services in the economy falls, because there is less demand for their jobs. Trade increases job growth in the US economy, but in some industries there are job losses.

 

The argument is relatively easy to understand. Countries with a higher proportion of more educated workers have an advantage in producing more technologically advanced goods.

Mitigating harm

There’s plenty of other evidence that trade has an impact on income inequality. Reviews from 1990 and 1995 describe the old evidence on the relationship between trade and inequality; there’s a 2003 exploration of the link between opening up to trade and inequality in Argentina; and a review of cross-country studies with data from the 1990s and early 2000s. 

More recently, a 2015 update of the H-O model has extended the empirical evidence to show how trade increases the technology level in all partners and a 2012 paper has examined urban wage distribution in China. 

But all the empirical evidence on the importance of trade to income distribution comes to fruition in a 2014 paper that finds clear evidence that openness to trade increases wage inequality at lower levels of income (within the OECD). It also found there was no significant effect at higher levels of income. 

The H-O model sharpens focus on the realities of our modern world. Inflation has been strikingly absent in the rich world during the 21st century due largely to the growth and efficiency of international trade. This has made products cheaper for the average American but, at the same time, globalisation has significantly spurred income inequality. 

The model provides a direct link between the Chinese internal migrant working long hours in a Shenzhen factory and the Silicon Valley employee enjoying an elitist’s workday, replete with healthy snacks.
Many economists had mistakenly expected Heckscher and Ohlin’s canon to become less relevant, but that’s changing. 

Recent work from MIT has provided the first and timely systematic evidence that the inequality effects of the H-O framework are much more profound and longer lasting than previously thought. 

The fact is that too few people acquire better skills as quickly as needed; too few disenfranchised families relocate to more promising regions; and the combination of decaying skills and lack of mobility generates a downward spiral of discontent. 

But all is not lost. Trade lifts all countries and contributes to improvement in productivity and the range of products at our disposal, and engenders myriad innovations that make modern life easier. Increased trade has even helped improve human rights and made companies more socially responsible. 

And we have known the optimal policy regarding trade agreements for a long time but failed to implement it effectively. Free trade has a necessarily distributive effect. And the correct path is to have trade agreements with specific programs to diminish its negative impact on certain levels of income. 

In NAFTA, for instance, the Transitional Adjustment Assistance (NAFTA-TAA) program had as its primary goal to assist workers who lost their jobs or whose hours of work and wages were reduced as a result of trade with – or a shift in production to – Canada or Mexico. 

We should concentrate on designing programs complementary to trade agreements, such as the TAA, especially as we now know some of the distributive effects of free trade don’t dissipate easily as previously thought. 

Ignoring Heckscher and Ohlin’s prescient wisdom has cost many people their livelihoods. The best path for society is to increase trade agreements but only if accompanied by fail-safes for the segments of society most likely to be adversely affected. 

Policymakers and researchers forgot this for too long and we are now facing the backlash.

This article was first published on theconversation.com.

 

 

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Building a great big wall will not close the gap. Jorge Duenes/Reuters

In France, far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen launched her campaign by saying, “The divide is no longer between the left and the right, but between the patriots and the globalists.”

Enthusiasm for inward-looking, protectionist economic agendas is sweeping across Europe, leaving xenophobic hatred in its wake.

Clearly, the experience of the past three decades of globalisation has produced massive dissatisfaction: so much that naïve, misplaced and often frightening measures are seen as genuine solutions by large parts of the electorate in the richest nations of the world.

Rising inequality, which has accompanied globalisation, has sprung to the fore as a key concern among economists, politicians and the public. The latest report by Oxfam documented this rise, and the figures were shocking, even to those of us who might already be convinced about the gravity of the problem: just eight men hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the world population.
 

What needs to be asked is the following: why is the world economy at this pass? Is it a labour-versus-labour problem? Would shutting borders lead to greater equality of incomes within countries? Would the poor and working class in developed countries, who are feeling the heat of unemployment, depressed wages and insecure futures, regain their (mostly imagined) former glory if their countries shut down their borders?
Or is it the case that gains from globalisation, instead of trickling down, have been sucked upwards towards a tiny elite, making an already rich minority even richer? And that this elite resides within, not outside, their countries?
 

Labour vs capital

In September 2016, I was part of a group of 13 economists, along with Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and three other chief economists of the World Bank, who met in Saltsjobaden, near Stockholm, to deliberate on the main challenges facing the global economy, and draft a short document highlighting some key issues.

This consensus document, the Stockholm Statement, was issued after intensive discussions within this small group. Our idea was to keep the statement short and focused on the most important issues.
One of our main concerns was the phenomenon of rising inequality over the past three decades. The advent of advanced technology has meant that jobs can be outsourced, a point also highlighted by Donald Trump.

While this has meant an expansion of opportunities for workers overall, the workers in developed countries often view this, or are made to view this, as being against their interest. They are made to feel that jobs that were rightfully theirs were taken away by workers in other countries, or by immigrants who are willing to work for low wages.

This is a labour-versus-capital, or labour-versus-technology, problem. Automation has meant that even periods of high economic growth have not been periods of high growth of jobs. In periods of low growth or recession, such as we have seen in the US and Europe since the 2008 financial crisis, the already gloomy picture becomes even bleaker.
 

While job and wages have grown slower compared to national incomes, salaries at the top have not only kept pace, but their rate of growth might even be higher. Thus, the gap between salaries of CEOs and top ranking managers and workers within firms has been increasing. The Oxfam report quotes from Thomas Piketty’s new research showing that in the US, in the past 30 years, the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50% has been zero, whereas the growth in the incomes of the top 1% has been 300%.

Thus, the real reason for depressed incomes and unemployment of the working classes in developed countries is not that workers from other countries are taking jobs.

The two main culprits are the slow rate of creation of new jobs, and the increasing inequality in the share of labour (wages) and capital (profits) within their own countries.
 

What we can do

Based on this analysis, we suggested three major policy responses.

First, we should invest in human capital, increasing skills alongside developing new technology. This would boost labour income as technology improves.

Second, governments have to legislate to transfer income within countries. This means new taxes, and sharing profits. The rise of technology does not have to mean the end of workers’ rights; specific labour legislation should be put in place to ensure this.

Finally, we must promote policies that cross borders. This means international organisation such as the UN and the World Bank should encourage policy harmonisation between nations. These policies must not just favour rich, industrialised nations, they should also allow emerging economies a voice in the debate.
 

A new social contract

The fact that the deliberations for the Stockholm Statement took place in Saltsjobaden is significant. It was here in 1938 that the social contract between labour and capital in Sweden, which was later expanded to include government, was sealed.

The contract specified the process of collective bargaining and management, and the focus was on negotiation and consultation, rather than hostility. Both the process and content of the historical Saltsjobaden Agreement hold lessons for management of our troubled times.

Our optimism for the future might seem like a mirage in light of recent political events.

But just as the collective voice of the majority today seems to favour a quick-fix, non-solution to rising inequality, our hope is that an articulation of the actual reasons behind rising inequality and insistence on a reasoned, balanced policy response could provide the real solutions needed to address the widening gap between rich and poor.

Ashwini Deshpande is Professor, Department of Economics,, University of Delhi

This article was first published on The Conversation

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Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

Demonstrators march on international migrant day 2016. EPA

On December 31 1937, Cambridge classicist and man of letters F L Lucas embarked on an experiment. He would keep a diary for exactly one calendar year. It was, as he put it: “an attempt to give one answer, however inadequate, however fragmentary, to the question that will surely be asked one day by some of the unborn – with the bewilderment, one hopes, of a happier age: ‘What can it have felt like to live in that strange, tormented and demented world?’”

Lucas sought to preserve an affective archive, and to write about how it felt to live in an era of spiralling crisis.

As someone who wasn’t born in 1938 I cannot help but feel that Lucas’ solemn hope that his generation was living through the worst of it – and that lessons would surely be learned – have been well and truly dashed. Has 2016 been 1938 all over again?

Bowled over by the news this past year, one can be forgiven for grasping for the crutches of historical analogy. Indeed, a number of eminent historians of inter-war Europe have discerned thunderous echoes of the 1930s.

At present, as in the “Devil’s Decade”, we are experiencing the capricious convergence of historical forces: the fall-out of economic crisis and the extreme polarisation of the political spectrum from far-right to hard-left – the centre doesn’t hold. A tidal wave of refugees is being met by proportionately more xenophobia than compassion. Militant isolationism is thriving. Doors are being closed and walls built. Culture wars are punctuated by attacks on “experts” and intellectuals. 2016 has even seen open an unashamed airing of anti-Semitism.

The historical parallels between 2016 and 1938 are abundant. There are important differences in detail, in time and place, but the pattern of events, and of cause and effect, is striking.

Civil war raged in Spain then – as it rages in Syria today. Then as now, these internecine conflicts provide mirrors to existing fissures in international relations and deepening ideological antagonisms. By the end of 1938, and after Abyssinia, Spain, Anschluss, and Kristallnacht, not much faith was left in the ideal of internationalism or in the League of Nations – and this too sounds all too familiar.

The aftermath of the Kristallnacht. Bundesarchiv, CC BY-SA

The rescue of refugee children through the Kindertransports was just as symbolically important, yet as negligible, a solution to an immense humanitarian and moral crisis as has been the response to lone children refugees holed up in Calais this year. And what of Aleppo? Shame was, and is, a dominant feeling.

Where next?

The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was perceived by many of its British critics as an act of national suicide. The Brexit decision has likewise, again and again, been described as an act of self-harm, even of national hari-kari.

Writing at the end of the year, contemporary historian R W Seaton-Watson had no doubt that 1938 had “resulted in a drastic disturbance of the political balance on the Continent, the full consequences of which is still too soon to estimate”. Treaties weren’t worth the paper they were written on in 1938 – and at the end of 2016 it is worryingly unclear where Britain will stand after triggering Article 50.

Meanwhile, George Orwell’s assessment of the disarray of the political left post-Munich could just as well apply to Momentum and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. As Orwell saw it:

Barring some unforeseen scandal or a really large disturbance inside the Conservative Party, Labour’s chances of winning the General Election seem very small. If any kind of Popular Front is formed, its chances are probably less than those of Labour unaided. The best hope would seem to be that if Labour is defeated, the defeat may drive it back to its proper ‘line’.

Full circle

One could go on seeking coordinates but the sum total would still be the same. The rug has been pulled out from under the assumed solidity of the liberal democratic project. A delicate tapestry of structures and ideas is coming apart at the seams.

Even more specifically, it is the psychological experience, the search for meaning, and the emotional cycle, the feelings – collective and individual – of 1938 that are uncannily familiar.

Post-truth politics is anti-rational. Emotion has unexpectedly triumphed over reason in 2016. Love and/or hate has beaten intellect. That’s true for Hillary Clinton’s “love trumps hate” slogan as much as it is for her opponent.

The referendum result shook many. PA

New political technologies render older ones obsolete. In both Britain’s referendum campaign and in the American election, traditional opinion polls failed to capture the emotion being expressed across social media platforms.

Back in 1938, it was British Gallup and the rival Mass-Observation that were the innovative political technologies. Using very different techniques, each offered fresh insight into the psychology of political behaviour and tried to unseal the stiff upper lip of the British electorate.

Mass-Observation tried to get into people’s heads, and diagnosed an increasing occurrence of “crisis fatigue” as a response to nervous strain and “a sense of continuous crisis”.

Almost immediately after the EU referendum, therapists reported “shockingly elevated levels of anxiety and despair, with few patients wishing to talk about anything else”. And the visceral nature of the US election campaign contributed, tragically, to the exponential increase of calls to suicide helplines. National crisis is inevitably internalised.

Reflecting on the psychological fallout of the Munich Crisis, novelist E M Forster observed that: “exalted in contrary directions, some of us rose above ourselves, and others committed suicide.”

As 1938 drew to a close, serious conversations were dominated by the verbal and physical expressions of fatalism, anxiety, sickness, depression, and impending doom. Lucas wrote in his diary:

The Crisis seems to have filled the world with nervous break-downs. Or perhaps the Crisis itself was only one more nervous break-down of a world driven by the killing pace of modern life and competition into ever acuter neurasthenia [shell shock].

It is too simplistic to say that history repeats itself. And yet, throughout this past year I could not escape the feeling that we have been here before. We share with those who lived through 1938 overwhelming sensibility of bewilderment, suspense, desperation and fear of the unknown. I can’t help but wonder what future historians will make of 2016.

It’s probably sage advice to go see a good movie over the holidays – and La La Land, already tipped to win an Oscar, may provide just the kind of escapism that is needed. However, when someone comes to make the movie of 2016, the soundtrack will probably be the late Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker. It certainly feels like 1938 all over again. Time to start keeping a diary.

(Julie Gottlieb is Reader in Modern History, University of Sheffield).

(This story was first published on The Conversation).

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And when Brexit came in the summer, it was clear that in some ways it was. Articles began to appear listing the horrors of 2016 – from Zika virus to the Turkish coup. By the time Donald Trump was elected in November, on the same wave of rejection of established politics as Brexit, the feeling that 2016 had a peculiar quality was entrenched.

This fin de siècle atmosphere was captured in what became the word of the year: post-truth. Both Brexit and Trump suggested it was open season for bare-faced lying and demagoguery. Yet for those social conservatives who voted for Trump he spoke their truths – and tapped into their fear of an unsettling future of rapid cultural and economic change.

Like the referendum voters in Italy, where Alfio Caruso’s 1960: Il Migliore anno della nostra vita (1960: the best year of our lives) was a 2016 bestseller, they nostalgically looked back to an imagined past rather than forward to an uncertain future. Similar fears of rapid change to their communities seem to have been key drivers of the voting behaviour of 2016’s social conservatives, who were if anything more post-trust than post-truth.

They were also post-irony, as the notion that Trump was the anti-establishment candidate demonstrated. In another irony, the tide of refugees that sparked some of these social conservative anxieties began to recede. Syria nonetheless remained a killing field. However, despite fears that Islamic State (IS) are seeking to export their theatrical brand of terrorism to the West through events such as Nice or Berlin, terrorism’s main victims remained in the same five countries of Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan and Syria. That 2016 was a particularly bad year is very much a Western narrative.
 

Sometimes bad is bad

How do you measure bad years? The easiest way is probably through human deaths. In that case, the worst year proportionately may well have been the unrecorded one some 75,000 years ago when Mount Toba erupted with devastating force, causing a “volcanic winter” and nearly killing off humans altogether. The Black Death pandemic of the 1340s is the closest we as a species have come to a similar cataclysm since.

You think Brexit was bad? Dance of Death by Michael Wolgemut (1493)

Within the past 100 years, the worst year in terms of death indices may be 1918, when the closing stages of World War I coincided with the deadly outbreak of so-called “Spanish Flu” which killed between 20m and 50m people. Such pandemics are, of course, natural disasters. Human activity can, however, spread them faster and further, as we see by comparing the global impact of the influenza pandemic of 1918-20 with the much more localised effects of the 541 Plague of Justinian.

So globalisation might seem as risky as 2016’s social conservatives fear – though of course it can also help humanity to intervene against pandemics.

Other human activities, notably wars, have the opposite effect. Wars are only the most obvious of the various anthropogenic ways in which humanity can drive up the death index in a given year, not least because they usually bring in their wake the other horsemen of the apocalypse. On such a measure, 2016 barely registers on the worst year index.
 

Shape of things to come

Humanity’s efforts collectively to win the Darwin Awards through self-destructive warfare were far more noticeable in 1939-1945, the Mongol conquests or the European assault on the Americas. Famines, those other disasters often hastened by anthropogenic mismanagement, have also been far more noticeable in the past, with the estimated 11m deaths of the Great Bengal famine of 1769-1773 both absolutely and proportionately a notable example.

So humanity won no Darwin Awards, thank goodness, in 2016. The year’s peculiar quality – at least for the West – lay more in the way in which it felt like the end of an era. If so, then it also marks the start of a new one. As is becoming clear with Brexit, it is highly unlikely that this new era will bring the comforting certainties social conservatives crave. Instead, it is worth bearing in mind that the kind of economic nationalism many of them seek has in the past proved a gateway to Darwin Award winning conflicts.
Meanwhile, unpredictable figures such as Trump now have their fingers on the nuclear trigger – when they are not busily riling China. If 2016 felt like the end of an era, there are definitely risks that the one about to begin could be a whole lot worse.

Author is Professor of History and Policy, University of Westminster

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Donald Trump, by Gage Skidmore

Trump’s election was a tragedy. But the outrage is its reframing – by the mainstream media and even sections of the left – as a revolt against ‘complacent liberal elites’. 

Media commentators were dismissive of Trump during his campaign. But now he’s President-elect they seem constrained for fear of echoing Hillary Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment. Everyone is terrified of implying that the working class Americans who voted for Trump shot themselves in the foot. We may be dismayed by post-truth politics, but at the same time we tell ourselves that people see through it all. False consciousness has become the ultimate taboo.

Right-wing populism across the world is harnessing public anger towards the super-rich, global corporations and financial power and turning it against politicians, experts, and the left. These are the wrong targets

People are not stupid. But they are misinformed and misled. 72% of Americans agree 'the US economy is rigged to advantage the rich and powerful', yet they elected a billionaire tycoon. We don’t know how to talk about this incongruity. The post-election analysis emphasises how Trump ‘connected’ with blue-collar voters. There’s an odd reluctance to perform a simple reality check – not just about whether he will build the wall, but about how his professed support for blue-collar workers contrasts with his plan to repeal Obamacare and cut taxes for the rich. The way to avoid the patronising connotations of false consciousness is to target the hypocrisy of the message, not the voters.

The priority now, many are saying, is to listen to forgotten working-class voters. They are right. But we must also be wary of regarding opinions as authentic and organic. We seem to have forgotten that opinions are made and people are influenced.

The right’s co-option of left-wing protest is what both Trump and Brexit are all about. Right-wing populism across the world is harnessing public anger towards the super-rich, global corporations and financial power and turning it against politicians, experts, and the left. These are the wrong targets: they are relatively powerless and they are the only means we have to create a fairer world. It’s true that the political class is homogenous, corrupt and aloof. But that’s a contingent, not an intrinsic reality. It’s the result of historical circumstance and neoliberal policy. We must not let the right convert resistance to financial power into an attack on political authority. 

The right has destroyed the left and stolen its language, using it as a decoy with which to push through policies that hurt the poorest. This shows that – in contrast to Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis – left ideology has won. But it also has zero power.

There is an emerging mantra that the real divide is no longer between left and right but between globalisation and national sovereignty. Naomi Wolf repeated it on Today. This is false. In a society that’s increasingly unequal, the opposition between left and right is more relevant than ever. It defines the interests of the 99% against those of the 1%. The conflation of the ‘global elite’ with ‘internationalism’ lumps Goldman Sachs together with multicultural tolerance.

Commentators everywhere are pointing to the ‘liberal elite’ and the ‘political establishment’ as if they are the real problem. Jeremy Corbyn echoed this view on LabourList earlier this week. We must resist this muddled and damaging trend. The term ‘liberal elite’ elides economic oppression with the political left. It fuses together legitimate criticism of global capitalism with the condemnation of left-wing parties. Thomas Frank, one of the original critics of right-wing co-option, has turned his fire on the Democrats in his new book, Listen, Liberal. While his analysis is correct, this serves unwittingly to reinforce right-wing populism’s undermining of the left.

Yes, the Democrats have failed to engage with working-class voters. Yes, the Labour party in Britain abandoned its core purpose by moving to the centre. But this betrayal is the result of constantly being told that the only way to get elected is to move to the right and engage with ‘business’. Sanders and Corbyn are of course the notable exceptions, but look at how they are ridiculed and excoriated by the media.

We on the left need to find our voice and reclaim our ideology. And we need to resolve and redefine our attitude towards political institutions, political office and political authority. Let’s not join in the bonfire of the elites until we know exactly who we’re talking about. Otherwise we will play straight into the hands of an ascendant fake-radical right that whips up public hostility to the system while quietly taking it over.

Eliane Glaser is a writer, lecturer, former BBC producer, and the author of Get Real: How to See Through the Hype, Spin and Lies of Modern Life (Fourth Estate, 2013).

This article was first published on openDemocracy).
 

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Never has a nation relegated itself into obscurity with such needless, reckless abandon.  Brexit is an unprecedented act of self-sabotage: never has a nation relegated itself into obscurity with such needless, reckless abandon. The country has opted for a form of ritual suicide, but one which will destroy others in its wake, fundamentally undermining the EU, the most progressive political project in history.A few immediate thoughts, in the early morning haze:

Cameron has destroyed not one union, but two: how ironic that a Unionist prime minister should trigger the breakup of Great Britain. (How fond he was of saying it was ‘Great’!). Cameron treated the renegotiation and subsequent communication with an astonishing degree of complacency: the ‘Last Minute Homework Prime Minister’ ended up missing his deadline.

Under Cameron, Britain has held three referenda. The one that people forget – about voting reform – may prove to be the most significant, as AV would have reduced the democratic deficit and could have provided an outlet for some of the widespread political discontent. How strange it felt going to the voting booth yesterday knowing that our votes actually counted!

Shortly after the polls closed, when the Leave campaign believed it had lost, Nigel Farage made an implicit threatof violence, as he had done in an interview with the BBC last month. He may now be the most powerful politician in the land – a man with no scruples, willing to endorse violence in a febrile climate.

In the face of Faragism, let us never again be coy about defending cosmopolitanism. Farage said it was “a victory for real people, ordinary people, decent people”, in a grotesque Palinesque attempt to delegitimize the citizens of our great metropolises. Every MP who dismisses “latte liberals” downplays the achievements of consmopolitanism, which has brought plurality, peace, and immense cultural and material wealth. As nationalism engulfs the continent, we’ll finally learn to cherish liberalism.

Young people have been angry for some time, with good reason. They will now be furious – and understandably so. We must channel this anger into political activism, or it will be channeled into something less constructive.

Young people have been angry for some time, with good reason. They will now be furious – and understandably so. We must channel this anger into political activism, or it will be channeled into something less constructive.

– If you lived in Swindon, Hartlepool, or Oldham, you might (vote to) Leave too. The political class has completely failed low-paid workers in the age of globalization. There was always going to be a backlash – but this one caused massive blowback for the elite, too. 

– Labour as a political party is a spent force: it may never again win a national election, and it has lost all connection to the labour it once represented. It did not learn the lessons from Scotland, and has now lost large parts of the north-east and the north-west of England. Without a political machine for mobilization (for decades Labour took for granted these seats), it was always going to struggle to persuade voters. In the north-east, south-west and Wales, substantial EU investment will now disappear – resulting in only greater rage, which the hard-right will exploit for anti-immigrant sentiment.

– In the short term,John McDonnell should take over from Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. Corbyn’s heart was never in it (we all know he favoured Leave), and his campaigning proved disastrous. He does not have the skills or temperament to be leader.

Note the individuals who will be gleeful at the new settlement: Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin, George Galloway, Nick Griffin,Katie Hopkins, and of course Iain Duncan Smith, Liam Fox and Nigel Farage. The Daily Express, the fringe paper of paranoia, now represents the views of some key figures in British politics. The forces of reaction are now in control.

– Who would have guessed that a campaign run by Will Straw and Ryan Coetzee would be a disaster? Straw, who worked on the failed AV referendum campaign, embodies the complacency of the New Labour elite, while Coetzee oversaw the worst electoral result in British history – the Lib Dem disaster of 2015, when the party lost 85% of its MPs. 

– China looks on with bemusement at Brexit. While it often disagrees with the EU, it respects the union as a force of substantial political gravitas. At a time of new global alliances, Britain has chosen nostalgic insularity – and its bargaining power is greatly reduced.

– As I wrote previously, the English have not come to terms with the fact that they no longer rule the world. Otherwise, they would not have been so complacent about their shared privileges or contemptuous of their partners. Humility, not hubris, must follow this act of petulence.

It seems amazing to have to point this out, but the world faces an immediate existential threat: the destruction of our species through man-made climate change. Instead of focusing on collaboration to ensure better regulation and higher global standards, Britain has decided to obsess over a manufactured disagreement about ‘sovereignty’, with all the passion of an obscure sect. This is a shameful neglect of our duty to citizens worldwide, and future generations.

Beyond the anger, I feel a deep sense of sadness. I am a European, with a deep affinity to the continent. We have not only harmed ourselves, but we have endangered others, when we should have stood in solidarity with them. I fear for our future, and for our friends on the continent.

(Benjamin Ramm is editor-at-large at open Democracy. He writes and presents documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and the BBC World Service).

This article was first published on Open Democracy.

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