A generation ago, Tom Wolfe wrote a novel about a financial trader in New York who called himself a "Master of the Universe." He was a WASP, smart, arrogant, rich and with a sense of entitlement that - at the time - was quite shocking. This Master of the Universe was also pretty dense when it came to dealing with real life - like being involved in an accident in a part of New York where people like him don't belong and where he can't manage things - or massage things, as I see it.
But the early part of the story where he is first revealed as an incompetent is when he takes his wife's wee dog out for a walk and gets tangled up in the lead. A friend and I read the book at the same time and boy, did we laugh at that bit. It's a great piece of writing - you can see exactly who you are going to be dealing with in the rest of the novel. It's a pleasure to watch someone so lacking in common sense taken down and Wolfe does it beautifully.
I think Wolfe's Masters of the Universe have taken over the world. In the USA, Trump and Clinton fit the description perfectly. They are used to the world being organised to suit them. They are operators. I doubt if either of them has come up against real life in the past 25 years. You can tell they are out of their depth if they get anywhere near real people. Hillary Clinton and her man at Muhammad Ali's funeral were clearly not sure what to make of the eulogies. And Trump stirs up hate against Muslims because he can't relate to the experience of ordinary people, Muslim or not, so he just pokes the bear.
In the UK, the Masters of the Universe have backed themselves - and us - into a corner. Did we - the public - want a referendum on the EU? No, the Tory party did in an effort to fight off UKIP. The Tory party has been tearing itself apart over the EU since 1976 and this referendum was going to fix that. It won't. We already know that. We'll be left either in the EU by a narrow margin or out of the EU by the same margin. Either way, a lot of people are going to be very angry.
The Masters of the Universe hadn't reckoned on the reaction of voters, who are feeling poor but haven't grasped the financial bit of the problem and have grabbed hungrily at the idea that immigration is the UK's big problem. Immigrants are flooding our hospitals (not true - except as nurses and doctors). They block GP appointment lists (also not true - they're too busy working). They take British jobs (again not true - they take jobs British people won't take). They live off benefits (nope, you'll find that's a small number of Brits). They are destroying public services (nope again - it's Tory austerity measures that are starving public services of funding).
Can you imagine what it must feel like to be a Polish worker in the UK right now? You think you're doing a good job. You pay your taxes and send money home to your family. You grew up thinking of the Brits as Poland's allies (a leftover from World War 2) and suddenly you're the enemy. Or suppose you're a doctor from Asturias in Spain. You came to the UK as a locum and you like working here. Again, you pay your way. There are a million Brits living in Spain, most of them not working, and yet the Brits object to you working here?
What will we do when this is over? On June 24, if we vote to remain, will we just continue employing our Latvian waitresses, Lithuanian cleaners, Estonian fruit pickers, Polish shopkeepers? Pretend all this never happened? Or if the vote is to leave the EU, will we get ready to chuck them out?
What will we say to these people? Apart from sorry?
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