What’s most interesting, I think, is the way Gill’s conception of brexit leads to the tactical mistake of insulting and dismissing brexiters.
If brexit is conceived in terms of a ‘culture war’ - a matter of beliefs, opinions, taste, subjective life - each side ends up inevitably in the kind of slanging match we are all familiar with. And this misses the point: brexit was driven ultimately by real, practical and material interests - by the 40-year struggle of the disaster capitalists to ‘roll back the state’ and marketise every aspect of our lives, and by the very economic insecurity made the lot of millions in part by that very struggle.
Understanding the cry of ‘I want my country back’ as a refusal to accept the direction capitalism has taken in recent decades, as in fact a plea for a more stable and secure and caring society, still leads to the conclusion that many people went for the wrong solution - because the problem really lay more in the UK than the EU - but at least has the merit of not simply dismissing them as ignorant, or worse.