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25 june 2016, what doesn’t kill eu makes eu stronger

So here we are, with a hangover likely to last a lifetime. Given around half a million people die each year, by the time we come to leave our now-beloved eu, the slim majority that voted for it will be dead. Sitting in our life-is-good trees though, we are too sanguine to the social calamity that is modern britain today for so many people, stuck on poverty wages or none at all, "zero-hours" contracts just the iceberg's tip of their non-protection by laws, unions or other agencies of the state and civilisation they are expected to belong to, and ultimately support. When voting, it should be no surprise it was to reject. This is of course is why we have a representative democracy, so parliament, government and "the system" can consider things holistically in the round and not in a binary, zero-sum way, but when cameron's reckless chancism gives a voice to this widespread disaffection, fuelled by a migration spike that to anyone looking seemed scarily disproportionate, there was never much doubt which way it would go. The only ultimate answers are retreat on raw democracy, or retreat on raw capitalism. Government should play a slightly mitigating role, and it doesn't help that london gets £2,713 of public subsidy for transport every year and the north east, which needs it so much more, £5; or londoners £69 a year spent on the arts, the rest of england £4.60. These things add up. I don't actually think we'll entirely leave europe in the end (see building the post-brexit boat below), but that halfway house institutional solution gets us no nearer to the commonality of civilisation we're adept at ignoring, be that within our uk or europe-wide demos.