EVER since Brexit, it has been tempting to compare the shape of events in Britain and SA. In the UK’s recent referendum, the poor and the working classes in the north of England voted in large numbers to leave the EU. The well-heeled and the cosmopolitan have, on the whole, thought this decision to be little short of insane, catapulting their country into a prolonged period of wilful, gratuitous uncertainty.In SA, the rural and small-town poor keep the ANC in power by voting for it in vast numbers. In the cities, the cosmopolitan and the well-heeled, both black and white, have increasingly come to see the ANC as a reaper of national doom.And so, in both countries, the poor and the marginal, by dint of their electoral numbers, are leading their nations down a path that fills the sophisticated with fear.The comparison goes deeper. Cosmopolitan Britain believes the poor have been deceived. People voted to leave the EU because unscrupulous men whispered sweet lies: that there would be m...
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