This thought was triggered  by a post from Umair Haque on Medium, under the title « Britain’s Finally Figuring Out Brexit (Really) Was the Biggest Mistake in Modern History » where he explained the recession caused by this decision and the effect on people’s every day life (NHS no longer able to take care of the propulation). Although very sad for Britain, such a level of shrinkage of the economy (-10% in GDP states Umair) as a result of the Brexit decision is actually what will need to be achieved worldwide if we want to survive the current ecology crisis. That is why it is paramount to get the lessons learnt from the Britain’s disaster in this regard. They are to me 3-fold :

1. slowing down economy without solidarity leads to disasters : it’s clear that even if Britain had suffered from such a downturn in the frame of the EU, it would have been tempered by the solidarity in the Union (remember the case of Greece and Italy earlier on, even if it was not a great victory)

2. democracy is not capitalism-compatible. You cannot have in one hand a governance promoting human rights and equality and at the same time a de facto power (capitalism) stating anyone can be as rich as he wants exploiting the weaknesses of others and regardless of the impact on the rest of humanity (the so called « freedom »). The wealth of the richest Brits would have balanced the loss of business in the UK without any issue, whereas I guess they are even richer today (reason why they promoted Brexit) 

3. democracies are miserably failing at executing people’s expectations. Because of the power money has gained in its ability to manipulate people’s minds through communication technologies, democracies have lost their balance between prince / aristocrats / people representation and mob (see aristote platon & Co) and therefore their ability to serve the people.

As key takeaways I would pick up : 

1) revenues must be capped by law 

2) laws must enforce restrictions / control of advertising tools so that no communication campaign can promote increase in consumption of any product / resource 

3) solidarity should be the moto everywhere, in speeches as well as in actions, of course

This post was already published on Medium on January 6th December.