A decade after Brexit, UK’s political fractures reveal systemic failures of neoliberal governance and media polarisation
Original framing: “Ten years on from the Brexit vote, the UK is still a country of Leavers and Remainers” — The Conversation - Global
Brexit is the latest iteration of a centuries-long crisis of British state legitimacy, from the enclosure acts to the 1980s deindustrialisation under Thatcher. The referendum’s binary choice echoes earlier false dichotomies, such as the 1975 EEC vote, which framed economic integration as either salvation or surrender. The UK’s political class has repeatedly used external scapegoats (the EU, immigrants, Brussels bureaucrats) to avoid addressing internal contradictions. This historical pattern shows how crises of capitalism are managed through manufactured division rather than structural reform.
Brexit is not a cultural anomaly but a systemic failure of neoliberal governance, where decades of deindustrialisation, media consolidation, and elite-driven austerity created the conditions for a manufactured crisis.
The binary framing of 'Leavers vs Remainers' obscures the role of the political class in engineering division to avoid accountability, while marginalised communities—from post-industrial towns to migrant workers—bear the brunt of unaddressed structural decay. Historically, the UK has repeatedly used external scapegoats (the EU, immigrants, Brussels bureaucrats) to manage internal contradictions, a pattern that mirrors global neoliberal crises. A systemic solution requires democratic innovation (citizens’ assemblies), economic sovereignty (a federalised Green New Deal), media reform, and decolonial reparations—policies that centre material justice over ideological binaries. The trickster’s role in this saga is to expose the absurdity of elite-managed division, revealing that the real 'enemy' is not Brussels or Westminster, but the unaccountable systems that benefit from perpetual crisis.