Yahoo Finance was sad to hear the news that Michael Elliott, the former CEO of One and an esteemed editor and author, recently passed away after a long battle with cancer. Yahoo Finance editor-in-chief Andy Serwer recently had the opportunity to talk with Elliott about Brexit:
Brexit was such a shocker that it’s left the media scrambling to explain what happened and why. Perhaps not surprisingly then, some key points seem to have become completely misconstrued, or so says at least one thoughtful observer, who has taken to Facebook to set the record straight.
Raised in Liverpool, Michael Elliott is the former CEO of One, the nonprofit founded by Bono, as well as a former top editor at Time, Newsweek and the Economist. He’s also the author of a number of books including “The Day Before Yesterday,” an acclaimed history of the post-1945 United States. Full disclosure, Elliott wrote a column on the global economy for FORTUNE magazine, while I was editor there. As such, I can tell you that there are few deeper thinkers than Elliott when it comes to understanding the UK, the US and globalism.
I guess I wasn’t surprised when I heard he opposed Brexit, but it was his level of ire that caught my attention. You can see some of that sentiment on Facebook where Elliott has unleashed some of his frustration in a series of energetic and erudite posts. (One of my favorites begins: “Hang on hang on, I can feel another Brexit rant coming on …”) And so I called him up recently in Devon — in the southwest of England — where he has been watching Brexit unfold to ask him for a bit of context.
“I’m very unhappy with Brexit,” Elliott told me. “But I wasn’t surprised by the vote. The ‘leave’ side had the passion, intensity and momentum.”
Now before you dismiss Elliott as just another sore loser
OxBridge type, (he does in fact have two degrees from Oxford), understand that he comes from a modest background. Elliott’s father was a schoolteacher in a working-class neighborhood near the docks. And this speaks to one of the biggest misconceptions that Elliott sees playing out in Brexit.
“There is this trope that globalism only benefits the elites. That drives me bat shit! My parents lived very circumscribed lives,“ he said, noting that his father lived pretty much all of his life within five miles of where he was born. "Immigration and globalism greatly improved life for everyone in my family.”
The arc of his life, Elliott argues, and his children’s lives has been shaped and improved by globalism, which is what Brexit seems to be rejecting. “And there are tens of millions more families like us — to say nothing of the hundreds of millions in Asia, Africa and Latin America for whom that is true,” he wrote on Facebook. “So can we stop this stupid crap that globalization and migration somehow only benefit the ‘elites.’”