Even if at some late
hour Brexit does not happen for some reason,
we will still have seen the country vote for and parliament approve a
measure which inflicts substantial harm on its citizens. Anyone who
still thinks otherwise should go through this Demos report
on the opportunities and risks that Brexit creates, and ask whether
the ‘opportunities’ are in fact things that we could have done
anyway. Yes Brexit may force us to train more doctors etc etc. The
disadvantages of doing it after Brexit is that the government will be
more strapped for cash. [1]
In truth there are
precious few opportunities that Brexit will bring, and an awful lot
of costs. Those of us of a certain age have got used to losing votes
of one kind or another, but in the past you could generally point to
some group or class that gained from our loss. What has happened over
the last few years has been something quite different: a democracy
voting for things that will make almost all of the people worse off,
to satisfy the interests or ideology of a minuscule minority. [2] The
lessons we should draw from Brexit involve understanding clearly how
this could have happened so to ensure it never happens again.
The referendum
result went the way it did because
of a perfect storm of two groups who had become disenchanted with the
way society was going, or the way it had treated them. The first
group, often forgotten by the left, were social conservatives who
could be quite well off but who had probably not been to university.
The kind of people who would react to claims that the Conservatives
under Cameron were moving to the right by shouting ‘Nonsense. What
about gay marriage’. The second group, the ‘left behind’, were
the working class in once proud industrial areas that had declined
steadily for decades. They were people who said before the referendum: 'well it cannot get any worse, can it'.
The first group,
because they were social conservatives, were naturally fearful of
social change like immigration, although they were likely to live in
areas that had seen little of it. The second group were more
dependent on the state, and saw in the last few years their access to
social provision steadily decline. Yet until recently neither group would have cared much
about the EU either way, and certainly would not have been prepared
to pay good money to leave it.
In John Major’s
day the Brexiteers were a very small group who could best be
described as an irritant. (John Major had
a less kind word for them.) How did this group get to win a
referendum? Crucially, they had allies in the owners of two key
tabloid newspapers, the Mail and the Sun. Over a prolonged period
these papers pushed two key ideas: that we were in some important
sense ‘ruled by Brussels bureaucrats’, and that immigration was a
threat to public services and wages. The first claim resonated with
social conservatives, and the second with the left behind.
After John Major’s
time in office, this alliance encouraged the opposition to use
immigration as a stick with which to beat the Labour government. The
Conservatives talked
about the UK becoming a ‘foreign land’. Concern about immigration
started rising well before the arrival of Polish immigrants. This in
turn led to growing UKIP support. With the election of Cameron the pressure continued, and
being the chancer he was he gave into the demand for a referendum,
thinking both that it wouldn't happen (because he wouldn’t win an outright majority in 2015) and that he could win it.
The final part of
the strategy was to associate immigration with the EU. The EU was not
a major popular concern until 2016. But the tabloids were relentless
in their anti-EU, anti-EU-immigrant propaganda
before the referendum. The Leave campaign emphasised immigration (Turkey) and the public services
(£350 million), and with ‘Project Fear’
neutralised Remain’s strong card. The bias obsessed broadcast media
did nothing to expose these lies, treated academic knowledge on trade as just one opinion, and the polls showed the lies were
believed.
Some have subsequently chosen to
focus on the left behind group, and to suggest that they were both
hard done by and their concerns about immigration deserve respect. Authors
like Goodhart have suggested
that the middle class social liberals that came to dominate the
Labour party had little regard for this constituency. We can of
course debate the successes
and failures
of the Labour party, but it seems this analysis misses the important
point.
Those who voted
Leave didn’t win. If they wanted immigration to quickly fall, it
won’t. If they ‘want their country back’, they will find that
all the EU interference Brexiteers go on about amounts
to little more than a load of bananas. If they think their wages will
rise because of Brexit they will see - are seeing - the opposite.
£350 million to the NHS will become £50 odd billion to the EU.
Those that will be hurt most by loss of trade to the EU will not be in London, but the very areas
that voted most strongly to leave.
In other words the
big news is that Leave voters were conned. The only people who
will gain from Brexit will be the tabloid owners whose power will be
enhanced and the ideologues who for some reason
think the EU was stopping them reaching their promised land. That, as
I suggested at the beginning, is not something I have seen in UK
politics in my lifetime. The parallels with Trump’s election are in
this respect apt. We can no more 'reconcile' ourselves to Brexit as we can think that Trump is in any way presidential. If your takeaway from both events is that Labour
should better represent the working class and Clinton was a poor
candidate I would politely suggest you are missing something rather
important.
If there is a lesson
for the left in all this, it is to be smarter about what the hard
right is doing, and not to play along by talking about British jobs
for British workers. The main lessons are really
for those in the centre and the soft right. Don’t appease those on
the hard right by using migrants as a political weapon (a lesson that was once understood). Don’t
appease them by offering them referendums. Don’t appease the right
wing tabloids by trying to befriend their owners and protecting their backs. Don’t appease
them by being unbiased between truth and lies. If you continue to do
these things, have a look at the Republican party in the US to see
what you and your country will become.
When Donald Tusk
received the letter from Theresa May yesterday, he expressed regret
that the UK was leaving and said ‘we already miss you’. The
letter he received made clear threats to end cooperation over
security if the UK did not get the deal it wants. This made me rather
proud to be European, and rather ashamed at the actions of my
country’s Prime Minister and her government.
[1] There are only
two examples I can see where Brexit might be necessary before we can
exploit the 'opportunity of Brexit'. The first is to enable us to reform a farming
system large parts of which are heavily dependent
on subsidies. People draw analogies with New Zealand decades ago. But
any transformation will be both painful and may threaten things we
take for granted in the UK, like sheep grazing grass hills in areas
of outstanding natural beauty. (George Monbiot likes forests more
than I do.) The second is to offer
development enhancing trade deals, where of course I fully agree with
my economics colleagues.
[2] I say the last
few years because I believe it also applied to austerity, which
people voted for in 2015 despite having endured its consequences
during the previous 5 years.
