5 Feet of Fury

Brendan O’Neill: Brexit is the most punk rock thing to happen in years

Brendan O’Neill is back…

‘Anarchy in the UK’ screams the front-cover headline, next to photos of Nigel Farage with devil’s horns, Boris looking bonkers, and Cameron looking stressed out. Remember when youths thought anarchy in the UK might be a good thing? When Johnny Rotten snarled, ‘I want to be anarchy… get pissed, destroy’? Now the NME loses the plot over a bit of political unpredictability and pumps out advice like: ‘Make sure you have savings.’ I’m not making this up. (…)

Ironically, I wasn’t worried about the state of Britain until I saw this copy of NME. Now I’m freaking out. There are really teens and twentysomethings mourning the loss of a bureaucratic machine? Fretting about ISAs? Feeling lost and confused because the people voted against a faraway oligarchy? What’s going on?