How Brexit ‘betrayal’ left us angry, bitter and (almost) ready for a revolution

We're trapped in a political cul-de-sac, and two thirds of us already believe we're set to grow further apart. Can we take any comfort in the fact that we've unearthed our political zeal?

Don't you feel lucky to live in these times? Here we are, blessed with an engaged, passionate electorate, freed from the bonds of apathy and ready, at the drop of a hat, to launch into the most robust political debate.

It's just a pity it made everyone hate each other so much.

A survey from the Electoral Psychology Observatory at the London School of Economics (LSE) this week found that half of us feel anger towards people who vote for parties we dislike, and a significant chunk of us feel disgust and contempt. Nearly a third of us confess to hatred. It even found that one in five people quite fancied a revolution.

It’s no wonder there’s some vitriol. We are locked in an argument the outcome of which will define our futures for decades to come. Brexit feels personal: we can’t understand why someone would want to consign our children to some godforsaken future – whether we consider that to be scavenging through the bins in a no-deal wasteland, or shackled like slaves to the faceless EU machine for eternity.

It’s the finality of it that seems to get the blood up. The idea that this is a decision for all time. There is no satisfactory compromise within our grasp, so there is only fury, fear and frustration. And this in an environment where almost any position on Brexit can legitimately, in someone's mind at least, be presented as betrayal.

Indignation, righteous or otherwise, stalks social media, becoming amplified in the process. It sometimes bursts onto the streets. In the run up to the European elections, Labour MP and Remain supporter Chris Bryant arrived at his constituency office to find the word “TRAITOR” scrawled in red across the shutters. It didn’t feel like a shock.

We've been angry before, of course, but rarely has the target been so clearly defined. You may have hated the futile burden of austerity after the 2008 financial crisis, but who did you blame? The coalition? The bankers? The regulators? Alan Greenspan? Ayn Rand?

Now the enemy is parcelled into two, neat dehumanised blocks of roughly half the country, both sides boasting enough red-faced blowhards among their number to harden your prejudices should it be needed.

It’s worth lingering on the austerity point. We are often told that Brexit was a primal scream of long-held grievances in left behind communities. It’s hard to argue with that, but it is sometimes hard to hold on to how the slump in public spending has prised open those cracks. Services have been cut, police numbers are down, local authorities are left scrabbling for savings: it’s a slow drip of news that steadily embeds inequalities, but never seems to quite describe the whole picture.

If you want to capture it fully, take a look at the introduction to the IFS Deaton Review into UK inequality published earlier this month. One finding it reported was that “deaths of despair” – which combine suicide, drug and alcohol overdoses and deaths by alcohol-related liver disease – have driven a new increase in mid-age mortality after years of decline. Deaths of despair now at least match deaths from heart disease among men and women aged 45-54.

Brexit has crashed into this punishing environment. It would be no surprise if the convenient, binary nature of the Leave/Remain cause turned some of that despair into anger. And so the LSE survey reports that almost two thirds of us believe we will continue to grow further apart, 60 per cent think politics always works for the same people, and more than half think that things will only go from bad to worse.

A properly managed (and definitively worded) Final Say referendum on the Brexit deal might create the conditions for some kind of closure. A general election where parties set out honest, unambiguous positions on Brexit might do it better. Either, of course, could end in stalemate, further polarisation and anger. Even more of us might start pining for a revolution, however gruesome.

Perhaps the only real positive to take from it is that people are at least showing the fiery zeal of campaigners. That, in the long run, ought to be a good thing, if only it could be directed at those tangible causes of inequality rather than the intractable wreckage of Brexit.

But a word of warning: my own mother relentlessly campaigned for nuclear disarmament, equality and much else besides. But even she could never get fully behind Amnesty International. “Trouble is,” she would say, “I think some people should be imprisoned for their political beliefs.” It looks like a fair number of us are starting to feel the same.