Low paid jobs for British born workers

I have always had a problem with those who focus on the need to reduce low skilled immigration. Skilled migrants are OK, so the argument goes, because the UK needs their skills, but we don’t need low skilled immigrants because British workers can do those jobs. At a microeconomic level it makes sense, and in a world where there is widespread unskilled unemployment it may make sense. But in a high employment economy like the UK today, it makes no sense at the macro level.

To see this, let’s think about a stylised example. Suppose there are a fixed number of jobs at each skill level. You will always need the same number of engineers, care workers and so on. To make things easy suppose 50% of jobs are skilled and 50% are unskilled. You then allow some skilled immigration but not unskilled immigration. These immigrants demand goods and services like anyone else, increasing the overall number of jobs in the economy but not its skill mix. That has to mean that among British born workers, less than 50% are now skilled and over 50% are unskilled. The immigration system is shifting the British born workforce into more unskilled jobs.

It gets worse if we recognise that a skill based immigration system is, in essence, about pay, not skill. With the exception of those with a recognised qualification like a PhD, it is hard to measure how people's skills compare. What you can assess is how much they will be paid in the job they have been offered. So in the first instance an immigration system that is designed to exclude unskilled workers is actually excluding low paid workers. If you combine that insight into the stylised example above, it must mean that the immigration system is shifting the British born workforce into lower paid jobs.

So when people call for an end to unskilled immigration, they are in effect calling for more British born workers to be low paid.

That is a necessary conclusion from the assumptions I have made, but are my assumptions wrong? Home Secretary Priti Patel says there are 8.5 million economically inactive people in the UK who could do these unskilled jobs. By implication, unskilled migration is preventing these people getting jobs. The ONS estimate that only 1.9 million of those people want a job, and it is an open question how many can actually do the kind of jobs we are talking about, as very few are discouraged workers and many more are students, the sick, carers, or have retired early.

A second key assumption I made is that the number of high and low paid jobs does not change. Could stopping most low paid immigration force firms who pay low wages to pay more, or invest in labour saving machinery? For example, in talking about the care sector, the recent MAC report says

“We remain of the view that the very real problems in this sector are caused by a failure to offer competitive terms and conditions, something that is itself caused by a failure to have a sustainable funding model.”

But as Polly Toynbee points out, working in the care sector (which should be classed as skilled but isn’t because the pay is so bad) is poorly paid because the money comes from the government via local authorities. Restricting immigration will not push up wages because the government ensures there is no money to pay higher wages. All that would happen is firms would be unprofitable and close down. A social care disaster is a very expensive way of getting the government to pay more.

But there is a more general point to be made here. We have a more efficient way of raising low pay than starving particular sectors of overseas workers, and that is by raising the minimum wage and enforcing that minimum. Take the food processing sector, which is another area that depends on many low paid workers from overseas. If you steadily raise the minimum wage, and pre-commit to doing so, you give firms time to adjust through mechanisation or raising wages. If the flow of workers suddenly dries up, it is more likely the firm will decide to locate its production overseas, which in turn may damage domestic supply industries.

One Brexiter, the CEO of the Scottish Seafood Association, has already said the plans would be disastrous for the Scottish fishing industry, for exactly this reason. As Jonathan Portes points out, the government’s plans largely follow MACs recommendations, and they could have been a lot worse. In practice the number of sectors where some unskilled immigration is allowed in is likely to expand from industry pressure.

If it doesn’t, then the UK food processing industry is not the only one that is likely to shrink. The UK tourism industry, that brings in lots of export earnings, will also be hard hit. Some industries cannot be so easily shifted overseas. The construction sector may just have to delay completion of some projects. I have already noted the problems in the care sector.

Why has the government chosen to go with the 'skilled immigrants good/unskilled immigrants bad' idea? As Bronwen Maddox says, it is a political rather than economic choice. It reflects the fact that the economic case for immigration cuts through. As I noted here, the salience of immigration has been falling since just before the referendum vote. It is easy to put that down to voters thinking that Brexit has solved the immigration problem, but an IPSOS/MORI poll suggests that is not the most important factor.

Half the people surveyed are less worried about immigration because they have understood the importance of the contribution immigrants make. Now immigrants with skills, in many people's minds, provide a clear contribution to the economy because of their skill, particularly if there are not enough workers with similar skills from the UK. That does not apply to unskilled workers, hence the focus on stopping unskilled immigration. In addition, all the negative stories they read about immigrants involve those who are unskilled.

As a result, politicians who want to appear ‘anti-immigrant’ focus on stopping unskilled immigration. But if you asked voters do they want British born workers to do more low paid work, the answer would be an overwhelming no. Thinking in macro terms is not easy. The reality is that, unless the government is planning to close down whole industries, restricting low paid immigration implies lower pay for British born workers.

What causes concern about immigration

It is part of folk lore among politicians and most social scientists that concern about immigration is governed by the number of immigrants. So how do we account for the decline in the relative salience of immigration since the EU referendum (source)?

There are of course many explanations for this decline. Perhaps people now see the benefits of immigration after all the post-referendum talk of nursing and doctor shortages. A rather more straightforward explanation is that people think that by leaving the EU the immigration 'problem' is being solved (i.e immigration numbers are much reduced). If it is the latter, then their knowledge is incomplete.

Immigration from the EU has declined dramatically, which is not surprising, but this has been partly offset by a significant rise in non-EU immigration (source). Are people really more concerned about EU immigrants than non-EU immigrants?

Roy Greenslade notes that the newspaper articles full of stories of immigration peril have all but disappeared. He writes

“It was the press phenomenon of the age 10 years ago, and for at least the following six years – right up to the EU referendum. Since then, however, immigration has all but disappeared from newspaper pages.”

Could it be that the explanation for the diminished salience of immigration is the very simple one that it is no longer in the news?

The folk law comes from the fact that the increase in concern about immigration at the turn of the century coincided with the increase in immigration numbers, first from outside the EU and then from the A8 countries joining the EU. However, as I note here, there is a two or three year lag between the initial increase in immigration and public attitudes. The lag is much shorter with a time series for the number of stories in the press about immigration.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Much of the concern about immigration is in areas that see very few immigrants. If people are getting their information ‘first hand’ from friends or relatives living in areas of high immigration you might expect a relatively short lag between numbers and concern, but if people are getting their information from the media you would require some change in how the media covered this issue before salience changed. Or to put it more crudely, salience to some extent is inevitably going to reflect what is ‘in the news’.

This does not mean salience is completely divorced from what people think. You could fill newspapers with stories about the housing problems of the very wealthy and it is unlikely that housing would start climbing the salience ranking. It is also true that rising immigration numbers helped newspapers write stories of 'floods' and 'waves'. But what it does mean is that if stories about immigration start disappearing, salience will gradually decline.

The more interesting question is why newspaper headlines about immigration, which in newspapers like the Sun and the Mail were explicitly or implicitly hostile to immigration, should decline sharply after the referendum vote. Roy Greenslade writes

“Yet the undeniable truth, the sad, sick, unvarnished truth, is that migration is off the media’s central agenda for two reasons. Firstly, it is no longer a political issue. With the pro-Brexit vote having been achieved, there is no need to keep on injecting the same poison into public debate. Job done. Secondly, seen from the newspaper editors’ perspective, it is not a sales-winning topic at present. No need to play to the gallery. There is no “value” in running anti-immigrant stories.”

In other words, newspapers are not publishing alarming stories of waves of non-EU immigrants coming to the UK because there is no political or sales motive for doing so. It is like saying if people who are hostile to immigration think leaving the EU means job done then let them. Increasing immigration salience was politically important for these newspaper owners while Labour was in government and to push the Tory government to support Brexit, but no longer.

Which, in turn, is why a Conservative government not led by Theresa May and without immigration targets can contemplate a fairly relaxed immigration regime, as Jonathan Portes notes. The other reason is that opposition to immigration (rather than salience) has been declining since a couple of years before the referendum, as the Migration Observatory also shows. Since 2017 more people think immigration has had a positive impact on the UK than think the opposite.

As Rob Ford notes, we don’t know why the public are feeling more positive about immigration, but equally too many have failed to notice how things have changed. I would add that too few also realise how changes in the salience of immigration tells us a lot about what has been in newspapers, and rather less about the underlying views of voters or, indeed, the number of immigrants coming in to the UK.

Will we get No Deal because Brexiters want it more?

“The reason we might have a no-deal Brexit in Britain is because its advocates want it more than their enemies want to stop it. They are making it happen whilst their opponents spend their time only wishing it would stop.”

When I first read this in an article by Sky journalist Lewis Goodall I thought it was nonsense, and stopped reading. It obviously does not apply, for example, to EU citizens living in the UK or all those who march against No Deal. But then I watched this, a talk by Dominic Cummings on his referendum victory (HT @ericlonners), and I realised what Goodall was talking about.. I went back to the article, read it in full and mostly agreed with it.

The trigger was a point that Cummings makes in his talk about most of the media covering politics. They are essentially interested in the government, parliament and its MPs, and so everything they say has to be taken in this context. It is a point I have made myself before, but it is easy to forget. Goodall is not talking about those who march for Remain, or the trivial numbers that march for Leave, but instead he is talking about MPs in parliament. And I think on this he is right.

Take the discussion of a possible coalition of national unity that MPs could vote for if the only way of stopping Johnson allowing No Deal is to vote him out. The job of the coalition would be to get an extension of Article 50 and then call a General Election. The idea is that rebel Tory MPs could only do this if Corbyn does not lead that coalition, because Corbyn “has become toxic”. So avoiding No Deal is less important than allowing a Corbyn government, even if that government would last no more than a month! That supports Goodall’s thesis.

The LibDems seem to be saying the same thing. They would not vote for a Corbyn led coalition government even, it seems, if the alternative was No Deal. Again avoiding No Deal is less important than allowing a very temporary Corbyn government. That supports Goodall’s thesis too, and it comes from the so called ‘party of Remain’.

Finally the Labour leadership has ruled out any kind of coalition of national unity if it was not led by Corbyn. I can see why - it is hard to admit so publicly that your leader is toxic to other Mps just before a General Election - but nevertheless it means they are also putting party before preventing No Deal. Goodall is right again.

But what does all this actually mean? Simply that all these MPs or party leaders are prepared to put party interests ahead of national interests. We can but hope that at least some of this is posturing ahead of negotiations, but such posturing can in itself be harmful to the cause of preventing No Deal.

Of course the corollary is not that Brexiters are putting country ahead of party. A No Deal Brexit is only something that a fanatic would do. A better formulation of Goodall’s idea is that No Deal will happen because No Dealers are fanatics and opponents of No Deal are putting party before country.

What about the nonsense that No Deal is required to respect democracy in the form of the 2016 vote? This is preposterous because 2016 cannot be a mandate for a No Deal Brexit when No Deal was ruled out by the Leave campaign. Bexiters implicitly acknowledge this is true by pretending that they had talked about No Deal in that referendum. But if you want to see what kind of mandate 2016 does represent, it is well worth watching the talk by Cummings noted above.

As well as showing an acute understanding of how the UK broadcast media works, his comments on what won the referendum for Leave are interesting. He notes that before the referendum most people knew little about the EU, and in addition were not particularly exercised by it as an issue. (Polling confirms this.) So, quite simply, to win the referendum the Leave campaign had to associate the EU in a negative way with things people were exercised about. Cummings talks about keeping the original Brexiters, who did want to talk about the EU, well away from the campaign.

Cummings notes three things people did care about. The first and most obvious was immigration. He says this issue had become 'associated with the EU', and there were two reasons for this in my view. The first was the Conservative targets for total net immigration which had not been met, together with the rhetoric that blamed reduced access to public services on immigrants rather than austerity. The second was the idea put forward by the pro-Brexit press that these targets had not been met because of Freedom of Movement. In this respect the following ONS chart is revealing:

Before the referendum non-EU immigration was equal to EU immigration, so it is not at all obvious that Freedom of Movement was the only reason targets were not met. Immigration has been broadly stable since the referendum, because the fall in EU migration has been offset by a rise in non-EU immigration.

The second factor Leave had going for it, according to Cummings, was the outcome of the Global Financial Crisis, and I would add austerity. The reason is obvious, but again little to do with the EU. The third was the problems with the Eurozone, but again the Eurozone’s problems all stemmed from a single currency, and not the trade and other arrangements of the EU. Therefore what all three have in common is that they have little to do with the EU.

Which brings us back to whether the people saying they want No Deal care more about it than those who want to stop No Deal. Cummings’ analysis suggests that they don’t, because by his own admission they were voting for issues that had little to do with the EU. They evidently don’t because we have not seen hundreds of thousands march on Westminster in support of any kind of Brexit. The best they could manage were ‘thousands’ when the March deadline was missed. We have seen six million sign a petition to revoke Article 50, but a tenth of that number signing a petition for No Deal.

The fact that Remainers want to stay in the EU more than No Dealers want us to crash out should come as no surprise. Leaving the EU takes away basic rights from EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU, and confers no new rights in return It takes away the right of young people to work visa free in the EU. It takes away many people’s European identity. Crashing out will make almost everyone poorer and few better off. It will cost lives. All for the notion that we will become ‘independent’, when few Leavers can name a law imposed on them by the EU that they disagree with, and even fewer an EU law that the UK voted against. Brexit is one part of the population imposing considerable costs on the rest, for reasons that have little to do with the EU.

Triangulation or bipartisanship does not work when one side goes off the scale

Brad DeLong describes himself as a Rubin Democrat, which he defines as “largely neoliberal, market-oriented, and market-regulation and tuning aimed at social democratic ends.” It is a natural position for an economist to be: it is generally more efficient to tweek markets than destroy them. But he thinks the time has come for this kind of Democrat to pass the baton over to the left. “We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.”

That is an unusual thing to say, on either side of the Atlantic. In the UK the left under Corbyn is in the lead, but you see few of the people who used to run the Labour party saying anything similar. Instead some have conducted a relentless campaign to undermine him. Not only is DeLong unusual, I also think he is probably right, so I want to examine the reasons he gives.

The key point he makes is that the political right has torn up the normal rules of the game, by both moving further to the right and becoming totally partisan. This was very clear in the Obama years. Obama pursued Romney’s health care policy and John McCain’s climate policy and George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy. “And did George H.W. Bush, did Mitt Romney, did John McCain say a single good word about anything Barack Obama ever did over the course of eight solid years? No, they fucking did not.”

There is much less bipartisan cooperation in the UK compared to the US, but I think there is a clear analogy with triangulation. The lesson Brown and Blair drew from the defeats of the 1980s was that Labour needed to win the middle class, and that meant moving policy to the centre ground. There was little attempt to reverse the neoliberalism of Thatcher, but instead to mitigate its social effects.

But the problem is that the political right in both countries were not playing by the same rules. They had a quite different strategy, which was to shift policy on issues like taxation and the size of the state to the right, and instead try and win elections by pushing a socially conservative agenda. (Here is a formalisation.) There is no triangulation here, but instead an attempt to hide a right wing agenda by starting a culture war. [1] As the right has control over a section of the media, they can also misrepresent their own and their opponents position. That control, together with ineffective scrutiny by the non-partisan media, allows politicians to lie to an extent that would have been thought inconceivable a couple of decades earlier.

When the right adopts this strategy (what I have called elsewhere neoliberal overreach), attempts by the left to get bipartisan agreement or triangulate policies moves what most political commentators call the centre ground of policy to the right. This has two effects. The first is that policies that would be popular among a majority of the population don’t happen. It is often noted that Corbyn’s policies are popular, and the same seems to be true in the US. Second, those supporting the left wing party become dissatisfied with it, and try and move it back to where it once was.

A vivid illustration from the UK of how triangulation fails is immigration. The Conservatives, together with their allies in the media, decided to use immigration as a major weapon against the Labour government. Gradually the increase in the number of stories about immigrants living on welfare and ‘taking our jobs’ began to move immigration up the list of issues voters were concerned about. Immigration numbers were increasing because the government knew this was good for both the economy and public services, but newspapers used words like “mass”, “vast”, “large scale”, “floods”,“waves”“army”, or “hordes”. With a few exceptions it was not voters in areas where migration was increasing that were reacting, and the best predictor of voter concern was which newspapers voters read.

Eventually Labour decided they had to try and triangulate, by talking tough on immigration. The case for immigration was no longer made. The false belief that immigrants made access to public services worse became ingrained. This allowed the Conservative government to deflect a lot of anger over austerity on to immigrants, and it eventually led to Brexit. The strategy of triangulation was a disaster. It is interesting that since the negative impact of reduced immigration on the economy has become clear with Brexit, views on immigration in the UK have shifted to become positive rather than negative.

Another consequence of the right not playing by the old rules is a lack of proportionality. I remember reading Paul Krugman during the Clinton vs Sanders primaries. I think Paul mainly favoured Clinton because Sanders was too populist, which naturally grates for someone who knows and cares about the detail and the difficulties involved in populist policies. But I also remember him writing that the Republicans might be hard on Clinton but that would be nothing compared to what the right would do if Sanders was the Democratic candidate. I’m not sure that was correct, because the right were not playing by the old rules where you had to stick to facts.

As a result, Clinton was accused of all kinds of imagined crimes by Trump, and the non-partisan media played along by obsessing about her email server. Much the same happened in the UK if we look at the 2015 and 2017 elections. The right wing press relentlessly attacked Corbyn in 2017 with wild charges about what he would do as PM, but what they did to centre-left Ed Miliband (‘red Ed’) in 2015 was not that different. Their attacks were not proportionate to how left wing their opponent was.

I think you need to add in one additional point here, and that is a public that is looking for radical solutions, by which I means solutions that move away from the status quo. The reason for this is not hard to understand: the worst recession since WWII following the financial crisis, stagnant and declining real wages, and geographical areas (rural, towns) that seem to be falling behind more dynamic cities.

The lesson of Brexit and Trump is if you fight a culture war and lies with just well researched and targeted policy proposals, you lose. It is better to fight a culture war with an alternative vision and popular policy proposals, and a bit of class war too. I am not suggesting that you don’t have well researched and targeted policy proposals behind that: as DeLong says “we are still here”. But this is the time for radicals on both sides. I suspect Sanders would have been more effective than Clinton at taking on Trump, just as Corbyn was very effective at taking on Theresa May.

You might have noticed that I have said very little about policy divisions between the left and centre-left, and that is because in practice I don’t think they are very important. In both countries the left cannot implement much that the centre-left disagrees with, and much of what the left want to do the centre-left are prepared to accept. [2] (Maybe not rich Democrat or Labour donors, but crowdfunding means that is unfortunate rather than fatal.) The key question is whether the centre-left allows the left to lead when it needs to lead, or instead fights against the left and keeps the right in power.

Let me end with Brad again.

“Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists in the past are concerned. They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side.”

Some in the UK may feel that statement just does not apply here, but they need to ask whether DeLong is right and it is the left’s time to lead, because what he says about the political right in the US applies equally to the UK.

[1] Cameron talked the talk of centre triangulation, but that did not happen in practice (with the exception of one or two issues like Gay marriage and the aid budget). With austerity he pursued an attempt to shrink the state that Thatcher could only dream of, and the degree to which the Tories wanted to shift policy to the right was masked by the Coalition’s other partner.

[2] One of the problems we have in the UK is supporters of the left who do not understand this, and act as if the centre-left is the enemy and it can win without them. But the centre-left also needs to recognise that on some big issues like financialisation they have been wrong and the left has been right. Some discussion on US issues here from Paul Krugman.

The Tory party lost its way from 2010, not 2016

“I have had it up to here with the Conservative party.” So writes a one time editor of the Spectator, Matthew d'Ancona. It is a good read: for example

“A chilling populism is now creeping into the language of mainstream Toryism: the language of treachery, snarling tribalism and impatience with anything that smacks of prudence, compromise or caution.”

He is talking about Brexit of course, and he is entirely right. What he misses, in my view, was that this problem did not begin with the EU referendum, but six years earlier, with the Tory ‘modernisers’, Cameron and Osborne.

I think d’Ancona gets to the heart of the problem when he writes

“By tradition, the strongest claim the Tories have had to office is a belief that ideology should be subordinated to reality. Even Margaret Thatcher – the most explicitly ideological of Conservative prime ministers – was ousted to stop the poll tax and to salvage Britain’s relations with Europe.”

Thatcher began neoliberal hegemony in the UK and a lot of the policies she introduced were popular, at least at the time. Her revolution was introduced with some caution, and when her caution ran out she was deposed. That caution, at the level of senior ministers or the party, had gone by 2010. The clearest indication of that is austerity.

Sound public finances, which d’Ancona says he supports, should never apply in the middle of a recession. We have known that since Keynes. As a result, in every post WWII economic downturn the government has focused on recovery and not the rising deficit. The single exception before 2010 was under Margaret Thatcher in her infamous budget of 1981. But that austerity was very different from 2010 for three reasons, in ascending order of importance.

1. The deficit was not targeted for its own sake, but in a failing attempt to hit a money supply target.
   
   
2. The deficit was mainly reduced by raising taxes rather than by cutting spending, which is more demand friendly. 2010 austerity preferred spending cuts to tax rises.
   
   
3. The austerity experiment was short lived and quickly reversed.

I do not want to minimise the damage done by the 1980/2 recession. My point is just that Thatcher and her ministers saw that monetarism was not working and they ditched it. Not soon enough but it was reversed. To use d’Ancona’s words, ideology was subordinated to reality.

The contrast with the austerity that began in 2010 is clear. As I never tire of saying, almost every first year economic undergraduate around the world is taught that in a recession you stimulate demand. Nowhere do the textbooks talk about worrying about the resulting deficit at the same time, because that implies austerity rather than stimulus. Unlike Thatcher, in 2010 there was no runaway inflation. The debt funding crisis that Coalition politicians were so fond of telling us about was a figment of a few City economists’ imaginations.

By 2012 it was obvious that austerity was a huge mistake. The recovery was nowhere in sight, and a key reason for this were large cuts public sector investment. It is no good complaining about the Eurozone crisis when you are cutting spending while interest rates have fallen by as much as the MPC dare. That is a schoolboy error. An imminent funding crisis implies rising interest rates on UK government debt, but by 2012 those rates were falling. The majority of academic economists who predicted that austerity would damage the recovery had been proved right. But did Cameron and Osborne change their policy, as Thatcher had done, and switch to fiscal stimulus? Of course we know they did not. Reality did not get a look in.

In economic terms austerity was the most damaging aspect of reality denial by the 2010 Tory based government. I calculated that austerity cost the average household £10,000, but the true figure may be much more if we allow for the damage austerity did to the supply side of the economy. It is certain that cuts to social care and the NHS cost lives: it is just a question of how many thousands of lives we are talking about. Austerity represented political deceit at its worst. Voters accepted nonsense pushed by the government about its credit card, and this allowed Tories to achieve an ideological goal of a smaller state which was otherwise unpopular.

If that was not bad enough, austerity also helped sow the seeds of Brexit. When people in communities that had been left behind voted for Brexit they said things couldn’t get any worse, and they said that in part because of austerity. But this was not the only grand deceit of this Tory led administration. They established a target for immigration that they had no intention of meeting because they knew the damage meeting that target would do. But their rhetoric that immigrants were responsible for the ills caused by austerity was a major reason that Cameron lost his referendum. A Prime Minister who had falsely told the nation why it was essential to reduce immigration had no answer to those who pointed out it could not be completely controlled because of Freedom of Movement.

Cameron did not just make a mistake in allowing a referendum in the first place. Through his ruinous policy of austerity and his demonisation of immigrants he ensured that referendum would be lost. d’Ancona is right that Europe brings out the worst in the Tory party. It shows how Tories can elevate ideology and party above the interests of the country. But that did not start in 2016, but with the destruction it has sown since 2010.

Did a partial framing of Brexit encourage Labour’s acceptance of its inevitability?

After the Brexit vote, the left (unusually) managed to define the way many people saw that vote by talking about those ‘left behind’. It was a ‘cry of pain’ from communities who lost out because of globalisation. Theresa May was happy to pick up this theme in her desire to proclaim the Conservatives as the party of the working class and of those ‘just managing’, without actually doing anything for these groups (in fact making their lives worse).

There are two positive things to say about this framing. First, it was partly true. Second, it brought the eye of the normally London focused media to communities it had largely ignored. But as an explanation of the Brexit vote it was seriously incomplete. Although around two thirds of those living in council houses or social housing voted Leave, so did a majority of those who owned their house outright. In geographic terms the areas with a majority of Leave voters were the towns and rural areas of England and Wales. While 70% of Sun readers voted Leave, so did 66% of Mail readers and 55% of Telegraph readers. Scotland contains many areas left behind by globalisation, yet in all of Scotland a majority voted Remain.

In addition, describing the Leave vote as a vote of those left behind by globalisation omits the rather crucial point that leaving the EU will do nothing to help those communities, and almost certainly it will make their lives considerably worse. They were sold snake oil. We have polling evidence that most Leave voters still think they will be better off after Brexit, despite all the advice and evidence otherwise. Many Leavers would support us leaving without any deal, which would be disastrous for the UK.

In contrast in 2015, Labour ran a campaign that was all about the need to raise real wages (‘the cost of living crisis’) and spend more on public services. That was not snake oil, but voters responded by giving the Conservatives more power. So why no cry of pain then? If your answer is that these voters did not see Labour as on their side in 2015 whereas they saw Brexit as something for them in 2016, then there is a very simple reason why. 

The simple explanation for Brexit is to focus on the media. To say that 80% of weekday papers read were pro-Brexit is an understatement: readers faced relentless propaganda against the EU and Freedom of Movement. People, however alienated or desperate, do not choose snake oil by themselves. It requires a salesman with a large attentive audience. As Chris Dillow reports, snake oil sellers put great efforts into marketing.

Does it matter that many on the left focused on the left behind story rather than looking at the role of the Brexit press? Perhaps it can help explain Labour’s stance on Brexit. If you have convinced yourself that the leadership always wanted Brexit, think about the large number of Labour MPs who also think some form of Brexit should go ahead (and I am not talking about Kate Hoey or Frank Field).

If you see the Brexit voters in traditional Labour constituencies as being motivated by decades of deprivation, you know that cannot be changed overnight and therefore you may choose to shape your policy to the wishes of these groups, and instead try to limit the damage of Brexit itself. If you had instead seen Brexit as snake-oil promoted by the hard right who wanted to align regulations with the US rather than the UK in order to weaken environmental and worker protections, you might instead focus on highlighting the lies of the snake-oil sellers.

It could be argued that something very similar happened to Labour over immigration. If you convince yourself that anti-immigration views among Labour voters reflect xenophobia or even racism, then there is little to do but placate them. This will undoubtedly be true for some, but we have increasing evidence that attitudes have been shifting and can be shifted when people make the argument that immigration is beneficial. What is clear is that the right used immigration as a political weapon, and the right wing press obliged with a steady stream of negative coverage.

If Labour MPs had any doubt about how power concerted campaigning, the 2017 general election should have put those doubts to rest. If such a large change in public opinion about a set of policies and politicians can be achieved in three weeks, imagine what a party with considerable media access campaigning against Brexit and for the virtues of immigration could achieve over a year, particularly when events and preferences are going their way. The suggestion of this post is that the framing of Brexit as a protest by the left behind was partly why we can only imagine what impact that might have had.

Trump and Brexit

As Trump makes clear, the UK can choose US rules or EU rules. Brexit is about having no say in either.

Of course every Leave voter is an individual with their own motives. But if you had to broadly characterise the two big issues that gave the Leave side victory in 2016, it was fears about immigration and a wish for greater sovereignty. Both were based on lies.

Immigration

You would not know it from the media, but people in the UK have been developing a more favourable view of immigration over the last six years. Here is a table from the latest National Centre for Social Research Social Attitudes survey on Europe.

In 2017, for those who expressed an opinion one way or the other, nearly three quarters thought immigration had a positive impact on the economy, and 65% thought immigrants enriched our culture.

Given this trend in attitudes, how did we vote to Leave? I keep going back this poll on EU immigration published in June 2016 which I wrote about shortly after it came out.

You can see it is consistent with the numbers above: people on balance think EU immigration is good for the economy and for British culture, and even for themselves personally. So why would they want to reduce EU immigration? Because they overwhelmingly thought EU immigration was bad for the NHS (and by implication all public services).

This, after all, is the line that Conservative and even some Labour politicians have consistently pushed, as have parts of the media with no comeback from most broadcasters. Before the referendum there were few stories about EU doctors and nurses, but plenty about migrants using the NHS. This concern was emphasised by the Leave campaign with the combination of the £350 million more for NHS claim and the prospect of being ‘overrun’ by Turkish immigrants.

The only problem with these claims that immigration reduces access to public services is that we know, with almost certainty, that the opposite is true: immigration creates net additional resources for public services. This is not complicated: they pay more in taxes than they take out because they tend to be of working age. But the myth that politicians and the media promulgate is that immigrants are somehow the reason access to public services has become more difficult, and they do this in large party to cover up the impact of austerity.

There was a final issue during the referendum that may have encouraged people to vote Leave. Even if they were positive about the EU immigrants that were already here, it just seemed sensible that the government should control their number. After all the government had set a target for net migration, and were having great difficulty meeting it. Yet the media never talked about the positive aspect of freedom of movement - the ability of UK citizens to live and work anywhere in the EU - and how that would end if we left.

Sovereignty and trade

I still talk to Leavers on both right or left who are convinced that the EU has taken away major elements of the UK’s sovereignty. One talked about “accountable democracy, sovereignty, independence, autonomy and freedom”. Yet when I ask for specific instances of a law or somesuch where the EU has compromised all these things, answer comes there none. There is a simply reason for this, beyond the propaganda, and that is that the EU is about harmonising regulations, and this harmonisation has brought benefits rather than pain to UK citizens.

International trade involves a form of cooperation with other countries, and international trade is good for both sides because it allows more efficient production as well as consumption of a greater variety of goods. The more we cooperate on rules and regulations, the more trade will happen. This harmonisation of regulations is like marriage: each side loses a degree of individual autonomy but we gain much more in return.

The thing about regulations governing networks of trade is that there cannot be too many of them, just as there cannot be many operating systems for computers. The whole point about harmonising regulations is to reduce their number of regulations, so firms do not have to produce lots of different goods which differ only in the different national regulations they meet. Which means that, if the UK wants to really benefit from the gains to trade, it has to choose one standard to match UK regulations with. And given existing patterns of trade, the UK only really has a choice between two: the EU and North America (NAFTA). Neither is likely to abandon their regulations in favour of what the UK may happen to do. (Equally third countries will never choose to harmonise on UK regulations rather than EU or the US.)

Translate this into Brexit, taking back control is like divorce, except in this case divorce from a partner you are still happy to be with (we happily trade with). To be honest, however, I’m not sure many Leave voters needed convincing of all this. As this poll shows, only 22% of Leave voters thought we would lose full access to the single market. Instead they believed the propaganda they were fed, that somehow their lives were being influenced in a negative way by the EU, and that they would therefore be better off after Brexit

Brexiters and Trump

While most voters were not very interested in regulations, many Brexiters certainly were. Most Brexiters are not very interested in immigration, but are interested in removing us from EU regulations and adopting much looser US standards. Of course they talked about ‘global Britain’, but it never made sense for the UK to set its own regulations for trade independently of both the EU and US. What they wanted was to get rid of EU regulations on labour or the environment which did not fit into their ideological framework.

To say, as I did here, that the Brexiters hijacked the EU negotiations, to make them about their own concerns rather than the people who voted, is not quite right. I think it is another example of deceit: getting what they want indirectly because what they want is not in itself popular. EU labour and environmental regulations are popular with most people. So the Brexiters could only achieve their goals through deceiving Leavers, and once more through our partisan or pathetic media they succeeded. After all, the first significant deceit, which was reducing the size of the state by making a fuss about the deficit, had been a big political success.

Normal US politics would want none of this. The US traditionally values the UK as part of the EU, and a jumping off point for their own corporations. Trump is of course not a normal POTUS. He is part of a right wing plutocratic elite that has captured the Republican party, and a good part of the Conservative party. Their aim is to spread his kind of authoritarian right wing politics as far as they can. Trump’s retweeting of Britain First islamophobic materials was no accident. One of his ambassadors has lobbied on behalf of former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson!

I remember writing sometime back that Trump’s election was a big blow to Brexit. I thought, perhaps naively, that at least some Brexiters would think twice before becoming cheerleaders for Trump. I thought some might be concerned that far from doing trade deals, they would be concerned that Trump seemed more interested in destroying trade by placing tariffs on imported goods. If any have showed any concern I have not noticed. It seems instead that the Brexiters, along with the right wing press, really are the Republican party in the UK.

Theresa May

Stage one of the Brexit endgame that we saw less than two weeks ago was Theresa May at last standing up to the Brexiters in her party. I think she could and should have done this from the very beginning. That she didn’t do so reflects naivety about Brexit rather than strategy on her part. There are many clues that this was so, some of which are spelt out by Jonathan Lis here: getting rid of Sir Ivan Rogers was a huge unforced error that conclusively shows that she and her immediate advisors did not understand the task they had taken on. But it would be suicide for her to turn back from her new path now..

Trump’s attacks on her are another sign of how important her Chequers document is. Of course it is not a plan the EU can accept, but it represents her choice to finally stop the Brexiters turning Brexit into their ideological, Republican orientated plaything. She must know that her new opponents will not be appeased, and do not do compromise. I hope that Trump’s humiliation of her will help her see that global Britain was always a myth, and that the UK has to choose the EU rather than the US. She will need resolve as she is forced to compromise further to get a deal, although she will try to push at least some of that into transition.

Perhaps I am wrong about the final situation being BINO plus face saving for the UK: perhaps the EU will offer serious concessions for the first time in these negotiations. But it is foolish to believe that these concessions will in any way be advantageous to the UK, and somehow make Brexit worthwhile. What gain is there to be outside the single market for services, when exports of products from financial and creative industries to the EU is one of the UK strengths? What gain in there in restricting EU immigration, when most people now agree that immigration enhances our economy and culture, and economists know also enhance our public services. Yes, we would have more sovereignty: the sovereignty to make our lives worse with no compensations.

Whatever deal May finally does with the EU, and at whatever time, it remains the case that Brexit will do for UK sovereignty the opposite of what it claimed. It is better to follow EU rules than US rules, but with Brexit we will be following, with no say in how these rules are changed. It is a huge indictment of our political system that our Prime Minister and a majority of our MPs feel incapable of saying to people you were lied to, and following this course gives you less sovereignty than you had before June 2016. All we can hope for is that the Brexiters, in their new found position of Brexit rebels, will vote against the deal and let parliament, directly or indirectly, kill the whole thing off. The Brexiters will have caused enormous damage, but it would be poetic justice if they helped bring an end to Brexit.