Just Finished Reading: WTF? By Robert Preston (FP: 2017) [280pp]

It was the double-whammy of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump in the US that made the author (and to be honest many other people) to wonder WTF? In this interesting and often entertaining book the author attempts to answer that question in the form of a long letter written to his departed father.

Although the Trump Presidential victory is mentioned in passing throughout the book the vast majority of it is about the author trying to figure out both why people voted to Leave the EU and, probably more importantly, why the Liberal media elite (in which he recognises himself) singularly missed the signals that said a Leave vote was coming. Part of the reason, he freely admits, was that he lived for the most part in a Remain ‘bubble’ in London among his other Liberal Remain intelligentsia friends and family. For the author the fact of Remain was a no-brainer. In the months before the vote I spoke to a reasonable number of people at work (so a very self-selecting group) plus other friends and family and actually called the 52-48% split to Leave. I actually regretted not putting a bet on as I could have made a few ‘quid’ on that! What the author didn’t realise, as he honestly should have being a political journalist(!), is that a great many people did not see Remaining as a no-brainer at all but quite the opposite. The Remain campaign, as most of my friends agreed, spent far too much time harping on how bad things would get if we left the EU. I actually think that they’re basically right but such statements were quickly dubbed ‘Project Fear’. The problem with this approach is that quite a few people honestly thought (and presumably still think) that they had precious little left to lose so such losses hardly figured in their calculation. What the Remain campaign also failed to realise is that they were essentially trying to sell a ‘Business as Usual’ message to people who had been suffering under such a regime and watching their livelihoods crumble year after year and decade after decade as they were increasingly side-lined and ignored in favour of a Southern (mostly London) Europhile ‘elite’. They were hardly going to vote in droves for more of the same. Leave, meanwhile, gave the ignored a voice all of a sudden in a vote with actual consequences – rather than one which merely rearranged the deckchairs on their political Titanic. So the Leave vote really shouldn’t have come as THAT much of a shock (actually they should have been more surprised that it was THAT close!). Given that they had nothing of consequence to lose (or at least that was the perception) they voted to Leave at least in the hope that the abandonment of ‘Business as Usual’ at least MIGHT make things better – plus it gave them the warm feeling of slapping the elites in the face for ignoring them for so long. Such a response is completely understandable. But, like the author himself, far too many people in the Remain camp (or the South-East/London ‘bubble’) missed just how annoyed – or down right angry – many people were, with a great deal of justification.

Although this was generally an interesting read I did feel a bit disappointed that the situation in America wasn’t covered more that the occasional passing reference. I was pretty much expecting this to be a 50-50 compare and contrast deal – which it definitely wasn’t. I suppose I also found it a little bit boring at times because I’d hashed and rehashed the arguments around Brexit over and over again with my friends and at work (I only touched on it briefly with my family as they all voted to Leave – even my Mother who hadn’t voted for anything since the late 1970’s). Recommended only really for those who didn’t live through it on an hourly basis for the last (seemingly) million years…..