well at 20 minutes to five we can now
say the decision taken in 1975 by this
country to join the Common Market has
been reversed by this referendum to
leave the EU you know whether you think
brexit is a good or a bad idea at this
point one thing is beyond doubt it's an
idea whose time has come the dawn is
breaking on the independent United
Kingdom this isn't something that just
happened but the world witness last
Friday was the culmination of a pressure
movement that started over 20 years ago
a movement that has evolved and devolved
across the years and bited it's time
exploiting every national and political
crisis to achieve its end
now of course choosing a starting point
for this is a bit arbitrary there have
been so-called Euroskeptics since 1973
when the UK first joined what was then
called the European community but if I
had to pick a date I might pick
September 20th 1988 when Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher gave a famous speech
in Bruges laying out a number of the
ideas that would influence euro
scepticism for years to come we have not
successfully rolled back the frontiers
of the state in Britain only to see them
reimpose at European level with the
European super-state exercising our new
dominance from Brussels the result of
the speech was something called the
Bruges group a conservative think-tank
that promoted rolling back the --use
trend toward centralization remember
this was at the end of the Soviet Union
and the world's great experiment with
socialism any form of one-party
centralization was a feared prospect by
many one member of the Bruges group the
historian Alan sked took the idea a step
further and launched his own political
party it was called the anti-federalist
League and it's one aim was to remove
Britain from the EU we can't run our own
affairs
nobody can this should be all too
obvious but sched Sparty had problems
from the very start
in 1992 the anti-federalist League went
up for only one seat in parliament and
only got 0.2 percent of the vote and it
was the same in the European elections
in 1995 the young movement just lost
faith in schedu bility
to lead them and there were internal
arguments about whether the party which
was soon renamed you Kip or the United
Kingdom Independence Party should remain
a single issue pressure group or expand
into other issues and become a real
party then in 1994 a rival Euroskeptic
party called the referendum party
exploded onto the scene led by
billionaire James Goldsmith who had no
such problems with infighting all he
wanted to do was have a referendum about
leaving the EU and once they got it they
would disband can only stop our
politicians betraying our trust by
holding a referendum which is legally
binding on the government
the referendum party tryouts do you Kip
in 1997 but both were trounced by Tony
Blair and the rise of New Labour which
would hold the country for the next 13
years and yet for those who were looking
closely it was possible to see Elaine
opening up for doubt about the EU in 92
only nine percent thought Britain should
leave the EC by 97 that number had risen
to 14% and if you add it to those who
thought the EC should at least reduce
its powers you have 66 percent of the
electorate expressing some form of euro
scepticism there are a number of reasons
why Europe was brought into voters minds
but the most significant has got to be
the signing of the Maastricht Treaty and
the adoption of a single currency
something that in 1997 only 16% of
Britons were in favor of despite these
trends you Kipp look dead in the water
but it was about to hit a few strokes of
good luck well bad luck for James
Goldsmith who passed away only three
months after the 97 election effectively
disbanding UKIP's only direct competitor
Alain sked was replaced by more
aggressively populist figures like Nigel
Faraj who won himself a seat in 1999 in
ironically the European Parliament by
2001 despite not winning any Parliament
seats in Westminster you Kipp had become
the fourth party in the UK after Labour
Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats
their profile rose even more when Robert
Kilroy Silke a former MP and chatshow
personality joined the cause did you
know that he may be sure politicians in
London decided to open our doors to a
potential 73
million migrants from Eastern Europe at
73 million
Killroy silk was a controversial figure
stemming mostly from an article he wrote
called we owe Arabs nothing
silk delivered UKIP's largest victory in
2004 as European parliamentary elections
coming in third above the Liberal
Democrats but more infighting eventually
out stood him from the party within that
year yet his example shows the
willingness of you kept to engage in the
worst forms of populism race-baiting
nationalism and fear throughout the
2000s and into the 2010s you kept
capitalized on a growing sentiment among
the British people of national decline
in the post-colonial era most keenly
felt by the oldest citizens who made up
the core of the vote to break sit they
capitalized to on crises like the
financial meltdown in 2008 the riots
that swept the country in 2011 and now
the migrant crisis and international
terrorism you kept and the far-right
assigned Foulke devils to many of these
cases like immigrants Muslims minorities
and welfare recipients all of these
things can bolster resentful nationalism
but they have to be triggered by
something closer to home in this case a
lot of the research points to the idea
of class trajectory
I have no GP as all up full in my area I
can't get onto the housing ladder and
have three kids in one room the place
where I grew up is now was the lovely
area but is now a no-go zone how are you
might I can see my son living at my
family's done living going down because
of this influx that we can't control you
can't say that you Kipp is the sole
force behind breaks it but they've been
there throughout the years to help link
these real feelings of falling
trajectories to emotions about national
decline and moral panics that group the
public and fear growing from minuscule
roots into a significant player in the
country's politics the United Kingdom is
not a far-right state with a
nationalistic anti-immigrant and racist
people but their decision last week to
leave the EU won by a 52% majority of
72% of the population can be viewed as
an expression of a reactionary far-right
politics and that's the point about
far-right political organizations they
use the fulcrum of populism and fear
to lift many times their weight in
people the ideas that animated this vote
are there in Thatcher's speech from 1988
of course the irony is that Thatcher
herself campaigned for Britain to join
the EC the first time around in 1975 the
even greater irony is that the unchecked
capitalism she championed as Prime
Minister led to a form of globalization
that has ravaged the middle class the
real cause of the frustration that you
kip exploits to advocate a leave vote
but that's the difference that forty
years can make brexit recontextualizes
all these small phenomena threads a
string through them and shows that
transformation does it always have to
move forward hey guys thanks for
watching sorry this is a day late VidCon
pushed me back but Hank green took
responsibility for it on Twitter so you
can blame him for that um if you want to
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thank you guys so much I'll see you next
Wednesday for something new Cheers