It is Monday 27 June 2016 and I’m on the early morning train from St. Pancras, London, to Sheffield. This is the first Monday after the momentous referendum result delivered the Brexit verdict. The radio in the taxi to the station broadcasts the slightly hysterical chatterings of the radio hosts and guests speculating about what happens next, reflecting a consensus amongst the financial elites that this is bad news for the UK economy. George Osborne, the Chancellor, has been silent for four days, having led the charge against Tory MPs supportive of Brexit – he’s due to make a statement at 7am.

Brexit leader Boris Johnson, the brash former London Mayor who many regard as Cameron’s successor, struck an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone before 7am by calling on Brexiters to reach out to those who voted to stay – probably not much use to those in the financial district who want more details on what happens next as they put in play plans to manage the fallout.

Last night at a dinner party I sat next to a Japanese national who has lived in the UK for 18 years and works for a fish import company – as the pound tanked, he has to pay more for his fish, and this gets passed on to the consumer. He hires Czechs and Rumanians to do the heavy physical work of handling the fish because, he says, British workers are not prepared to do that kind of work. He insists he pays foreign workers the same wage as he would pay a UK national. Another person at the dinner table was an Italian University lecturer – despite a letter from his University management on Friday that nothing will change, he now has no certainty about his future, nor did his Scottish colleague who teaches photography know what is going to happen to all the European students who pay good money to study his course in the UK. The Italian’s toast was “to Great Britain which is getting smaller by the day!”

As a South African, why a country would so willingly self-inflict such economic damage is deeply baffling. How a political leadership gets itself into such a mess at this time in global politics is even more baffling. And after just returning from a week in the USA where the inconceivable possibility of psychopath Donald Trump becoming President is now seriously being considered (according to polls, if the election took place now, 50 million Americans would vote for this utter ignoramus!), I cannot help ponder what this means from a South African perspective at exactly the moment when the Zuma leadership is doing all it can to disappear South Africa off the global stage wearing a ‘junk status’ label. A world run by Boris and Donald will have little time for a pimple of a country on the Southern tip of Africa that cannot be relied upon to steal money discretely. Maybe there are ways that may be helpful for us to understand what is going on.

What South Africans might find hard to realize is that the Brexit referendum was initiated by David Cameron to counter pro-Brexiters like Boris Johnson in his own party, and to head off defections to the right-wing UKIP party. It was inconceivable for him that the British people would vote to leave the EU – and so a referendum to outmanoeuvre his opponents in his own party and thus ensure for himself a second term seemed like a clever move at the time. That it has backfired is probably one of the more dramatic political miscalculations in the recent history of British politics.

True, UKIP emerges stronger having transformed the economic hardships of the growing number of poorer people suffering the negative consequences of the kind of globalization reinforced by the EU and enforced by austerity economics into jingoistic insanities like “we want our country back” (as if being ruled by Whiteahall is any more democratic than rule by Brussels!). But Boris Johnson could emerge from all this as Prime Minister. He and his cabal would be the real winners. Why does’nt he care for the EU and its economic advantages? Well, to answer that you need to understand that when he was Mayor of London his strategy was to attract investors from Asia, oil rich states and tax havens into a bizarre string of iconic property development projects that have transformed big chunks of London into playgrounds for the rich and laboratories for the architectural glitterati. This is what Guardian newspaper journalist Oliver Wainwright talked about at his Next Talk at the #IABR two weeks ago in Rotterdam – a talk entitled “Sell-out City”.

The fact of the matter is that the majority of people who voted for Brexit were older, poorly educated, lower income, non-metropolitan English and Welsh white people whose conception of ‘little England’ got stuck somewhere in the 1950s when the empire seemed stronger than ever. They were joined by a bizarre mix of baby boomer professionals and business people who seem fixated on sovereignty and obsessed with their privileges. 70% of young people voted to remain in the EU – not surprisingly, they hate the idea of their futures confined to this tiny grey island whose heyday has long passed. I mean who would want to oppose being free to work in Italy, or Southern France or hi-tech ultra-productive Germany?

For Boris Johnson, rising inequality is a sign of progress and the unhappiness that comes from exclusion is then usefully blamed on the “loss of sovereignty” to faceless EU bureaucrats and the inflows of nasty Europeans with strange un-British habits who get jobs at companies like my dinner partner’s fish import company. Boris Johnson has no patience for an ailing, austerity stricken, welfare-oriented environmentally sensitive (well, sort of) overregulated Europe – he has unleashed the base animal spirits of global capitalism in dramatic style in London, and tasted the sweet fruits this can bring to a brash new politically ambitious globally networked class of property developers, architects and financiers and their friends in all sorts of shady places. For Boris, the message will be simple: forget about the EU, look much much further East, and to the tax havens, so that he can do for the rest of Britain what he did to London. And if Donald becomes President, well then all bets are off – kleptomaniacal capitalism will literally ‘trump’ democracy in the heartlands of what used to be called the ‘free world’. All Zuma needs to do is hang on a bit longer so that the world catches up with him.

Every year for the past 15 years I have shown a documentary to my students called End of Suburbia which is about the consequences of oil peak. Towards the end oil peak analyst Richard Heinberg talks about the longer-term implications of rising uncertainty as the old predictabilities of the fossil fuel era start to come to an end. At one point he predicts that we can expect voters in richer countries to respond to uncertainty by voting for maniacs. As I watch Donald Trump mouth off his endless list of outrageous insults, prejudices and delusions, and as I watch Boris Johnson manipulate populist sentiment to misdirect the unhappiness of the victims of his approach to economic growth, I cannot help recall Richard Heinberg’s prescient words. The irony should not escape us: to displace the old political elites that have dominated American and British politics since the end of WWII, these maniacs must exploit the fears and prejudices of the poorer sections of their respective societies to get elected.

Saner voices like Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the Democratic Party’s Bernie Saunders could get drowned out by this extremely dangerous right-wing populist political cocktail with ramifications that no-one can really predict. But there are already rising forces of resistance: a petition with over 3.5 million signatures, calls for a second referendum, subtle hints from the finance sector to avoid the worst, and even Boris looked shell-shocked on Friday and it is very clear he and his ilk have no plan. Quite simply, the Brexiters did not expect to win – if only the results were in reverse with only a small majority voting to remain which would have discredited Cameron enough to enable Boris to emerge as the man to keep the EU honest and UKIP at bay. Now he has to clean up the mess, and this is a lot riskier than he envisaged. And imagine the calls he is getting from his mates in London’s financial district!

None of this analysis should be interpreted as a wholesale defence of the EU. To be sure, its role since the onset of the economic crisis has been revealed. Even the IMF has recently conceded that the Greek crisis was mishandled because the interests of the banks counted for more than the livelihoods of Greek citizens. When Deutchebank pulled the plug out of the Greek banks after the Greeks elected a left-of-centre Government, it was clear who really holds power in the EU. Freedom of movement for capital within the EU – with much of this, ironically, managed from London – has made it possible for German banks to drive up debt levels in the EU peripheries (Portugal, Ireland, Greeces and Spain), creating debt-based dependencies that have fuelled German growth.

At the same time, hard won human rights and environmental regulations have been achieved at EU level that are binding in EU member states. Whole swathes of environmental law applicable in the UK now can get repealed after the UK formally withdraws from the EU. Europe-wide labour regulations will also get repealed. Both these realities matter. To argue, as some leftwing political leaders and analysts have done, that Brexit makes sense is to ignore this more complex reality. Breaking up the EU is not the way to ensure a more progressive outcome.

Notwithstanding the problems with the EU, this is the most inappropriate moment for the UK to be weakening the EU. In a world made increasingly insecure by the rise of racist right-wing populism in the USA that could put Trump in the Whitehouse, by the increasing support for right-wing parties and neo-Nazi movements in Europe, by the increasingly aggressive stance of the Putin regime in various global theatres of conflict, by the fragmenting conflicts across the Arab world (from the degenerations of the North African spring to the Syrian civil war, to upticks in Israeli aggression in the Palestinian territories), the rise of resource conflicts and climate change disasters in many regions, and the looming threat of another global financial crash, this is when a broad democratic consensus in needed in Britain that reinforces the EU as a powerful economic bloc that could potentially act as a global stabiliser. This would mean forming alliances with other democratic parties, especially in the EU peripheries, to re-orient the EU away from its gradual drift into a proxy for anti-welfarist austerity economics. If Brexit does not happen and if the young people of Europe rise up to say ‘enough-is-enough’, then the crisis triggered by last Friday’s referendum might have triggered something positive.

As we South Africans engage each other in search of political solutions to our current multiple governance crises, we must realize that we only have each other in a world that is fast becoming increasingly unstable, crisis-ridden and insecure. Many South Africans who left for greener pastures or shipped their cash off-shore in search of better profits are fast discovering there is nowhere to run to anymore. The rest of the world is not an easy place to be. A stable, democratic, uncorrupted, socially progressive and ecologically sustainable South Africa could well attract all sorts of   innovations, initiatives, investments and talented people from all walks of life. Such a South Africa could build on positive trends in Africa, giving leadership to what could become the African century as the ‘old world’ goes into terminal decline.

Mark Swilling, between London and Sheffield, 27 June 2016