According to one learned friend it's a clash between two masonic bodies.
He sees the Trump/Clinton dichotomy in that same light.
At first blush it sounded like stock potboiler conspiracy but I am seeing a similar pattern emerging in the hive mind.
Two unnamed forces in a death match with 70% of society as collateral damage. Two forces whose greed for dominion of the lion's share of a shrinking global economy is laying waste to everything around, thrashing in throes to try and keep the old systems running one more profit cycle. .

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

"Seems to me that the thing about Brexit is that it's really, largely, a fight within the Establishment - they've weaponised racists and idiots, but really its a power struggle between various wings of the ruling classes."

So very true!

That's been my thesis all along in recent years. You have stated as such  in a brief comment.

It's been a storm gathering from de defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964. The social revolution of the 1960s, the year 1968, the hippies and sexual liberation ... a counterrevolution was about to happen. The Reagan/Bush years ... Newt Gingrich and Gov shutdown ... rise of then neocons and the luck of a Bush administration in a time of war .. the rise of might through Evangelical Christians ... terror, fear and Islamophobia ... populist parties tapping in the opportunity ... joint effort American and British conservatives attaining their goals of Brexit and a Trump presidency ... reaping profits for another eight years.

○ Democracy Unplugged, Regime Change and Project Alamo

Putting blame on Russia is just a big distraction ... running the playbook of the 1950s with Un-American Activities.

○ G W F and McCarthyism In A Digital Age - Part 1

Plenty of titles one can read and contemplate, an update of Warfare and Clausewitz ...

What Clausewitz Can Teach Us About War on Social Media - Military Tactics in the Age of Facebook [Foreign Affairs]

Cyber Wars:  A Paradigm Shift from Means to Ends [Min. of Defence, India]

Adapting Clausewitz to the Information Age: How Traditional News Media and Social Networking are Combining to Expand the Triangle [Naval War College]

Just found this from Leiden University - Perspectives on terrorism - recent online resources.

Global Warming - distance between America and Europe is steadily increasing.

Which is where parallels between Brexiters and gilets jaunes fall flat. God alone knows if anyone weaponised the gilets jaunes. A little help from the ultra-right, no doubt, or from RT, the FN... Certainly some ectoplasmic blob spawned by FB algorithms. More certainly yet a decade of austerity tacked on the end of several decades of gradual job bleeding and loss of future prospects.

But an intra-establishment struggle, not. The entire establishment is shitting itself. Even Jean-Luc Mélenchon looks uncomfortable.

I used to be afew. I'm still not many.

That activity is known historically as "raising an army", to incorporate numbers of people by hook or crook. This mass of people, this "body," this "party," has one purpose. That purpose is obedience to a commander.

Now, one asks oneself, "Self, what is my commander's purpose?"

That activity is, not ironically, known to the common man as insubordination. The attitude of each one to incorporation and purposes of the body is not indeed a trivial feature being of it, the sense of belonging to a "body politic", a senseless object.

Just so the "D" of DUP stands in for Democratic, next to Unionist. It had never before occurred to me to look into the abbreviation of itself.

Appropriate future access to low-skilled labour in Northern Ireland is important, particularly given the potential for local firms to be placed at a competitive disadvantage to those in the Republic of Ireland where there are not similar labour market constraints.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.