More on Brexit

[jducoeur]

The Guardian is continuing to impress the heck out of me with their investigative journalism. Here is their followup story, this one considerably shorter and more comprehensible. It continues to point to evidence that Brexit happened because of a literal conspiracy -- and that it may well have been a deliberate dry run for the election of Trump.

I'm immensely curious about how this plays out. I hope that this starts a real drumbeat for proper investigations into the Brexit vote, and the apparently illegal financing behind it. And the really interesting question is, if it turns out that the Leave campaign did break the law, allowing an American billionaire to illegally spend a lot of money to subvert British democracy -- what then? Everyone's been assuming that the referendum happened, and that the results must be adhered to, but if illegal means were used, that reasoning becomes a tad shaky.

---

As an entertaining counterpoint to all that, I'll add this delicious article-cum-memoir about Brexit from Dominic Cummings, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign. (Thanks to mindways for pointing me at it.) It's immensely long (I'm only halfway through), but a fun read if you enjoy politics. It's a (presumably enormously biased) account of what things were like inside the Leave campaign, redolent of the richest sour grapes -- this is the winner of the campaign describing in gory detail just what a fuckup the whole thing was, and how close they came to losing, not least because of just what a jackass Nigel Farage is.

But beyond that, it's a very readable treatise on practical politics, with a general thesis that anybody who says that anything in politics is certain is either lying or deluded. He repeatedly talks about "branching histories", to show just how essential both luck and a few key mistakes by David Cameron were to the victory of the Leave campaign.

Well worth reading, even if you just take it as a sort of primer in how on-the-ground campaigning really works. Regardless of the Guardian's reportage, and whether Cummings was in on this apparent conspiracy, he gives a good sense of what it takes to win in politics. It's not pretty, but it's kind of fascinating, and rather educational...