For the last five days I have been driving around England and Wales, filming scores of people as they talk about which way they’ll vote in the European Union referendum.
From ardent leavers in Merthyr Tydfil and undecided people on the English-Welsh borders to university students in Manchester who were 95% for remain, my Guardian colleague John Domokos and I have sampled just about every shade of opinion, and soaked up an atmosphere of often passionate political engagement. If a common journalistic pose is to roll one’s eyes and pronounce oneself impossibly bored with the whole thing, that is not where most people are at all.
Hardly anybody talks about the official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the national mood.
What must David Cameron make of it all? This story is unfolding, let’s not forget, because of his ludicrous belief that a referendum might somehow definitively address the EU-related divisions in his own party and the public at large – as if a month or so of political knockabout under Queensberry rules could sort everything out, and the country could then go back to normal.
Fat chance, obviously: he now finds his Eurosceptic foes emboldened by a sense that many Conservative voters are on their side, while politicians of all parties – and Labour people in particular – are gripped by something that has been simmering away for the best part of a decade. To quote the opinion pollsters Populus: “Both socioeconomic groups C2 and DE disproportionately back the UK leaving the EU.” To be a little more dramatic about it, now that Scotland has been through its political reformation, England and Wales are in the midst of a working-class revolt.
To be sure, there are many nuances and complications among leave voters. In the inner-city Birmingham neighbourhood of Handsworth, I met Sikh shopkeepers who claimed that the country is full, with just as much oomph as anyone white; in Leominster, Herefordshire, there are plenty of Tory voters gleefully defying Cameron’s instructions, and fixating on questions of sovereignty and democracy.
But make no mistake: in an almost comical reflection of the sacred lefty belief that any worthwhile political movement will necessarily be built around the workers, the foundation of the Brexit coalition is what used to be called the proletariat, large swaths of which are as united as in any lefty fantasy, even if some of their loudest complaints are triggering no end of anxiety among bien-pensant types, and causing Labour a great deal of apprehension.
In Stoke, Merthyr, Birmingham, Manchester and even rural Shropshire, the same lines recurred: so unchanging that they threatened to turn into cliches, but all the more powerful because of their ubiquity. “I’m scared about the future” … “No one listens to us” … “If you haven’t got money, no one cares.”
And of course, none of it needs much translation. Instead of the comparative security and stability of the postwar settlement and the last act of Britain’s industrial age, what’s the best we can now offer for so many people in so many places? Six-week contracts at the local retail park, lives spent pinballing in and out of the benefits system, and retirements built on thin air?
It may have been easy to miss in the London-centred haze of the “knowledge economy” and the birth of the digital future, but this is where millions of lives have been heading since the early 1980s – and to read that some Labour MPs have come back from their constituencies, amazed by the views they encounter on the doorstep, is to be struck by a political failure that sits right at the heart of the story. How did they not know?
What has any of this got to do with the EU? Not much, but such is the nature of referendums: offer people a ballot paper, and they will focus whatever they feel strongly about on to it. There again, one obvious issue is directly linked to the EU, and so central to the political moment that it arises in countless conversations within seconds.
Yes, some people – from bigots in the stockbroker belt to raging gobshites in south Wales shopping precincts – are simply racist. But in a society and economy as precarious as ours, the arrival of large numbers of people prepared to do jobs with increasingly awful terms and conditions was always going to trigger loud resentment. For many places, the pace of change and the pressures on public services have arguably proved to be too much to cope with.
Before anyone with a more right-on view of all this explodes with ire, they might also consider the numbers. Between 1991 and 2003, on average about 60,000 migrants from the EU came to the UK each year. Between 2004 and 2012, that figure rose to 170,000. The 2011 census put the number of UK residents from Poland alone at 654,000.
To state the obvious, that’s a lot. If people had felt more connected to politics, public services had been quicker to adapt, and the Blair/Brown government had opted for transitional controls, perhaps such huge changes might not have triggered quite so much rage and worry.
But such thoughts are now for the birds: for millions of people, the word “immigration” is reducible to yet another seismic change no one thought to ask them about, or even explain.
What people seem to want is much the same as ever: security, stability, some sense of a viable future, and a reasonable degree of esteem. To be more specific, public housing is not a relic of the 20th century, but something that should surely sit at the core of our politics.
If the modern labour market amounts to a mess of uncertainty – something driven as much by technology as corporate greed – it is good to hear so much noise about the principle of a citizen’s income, but disheartening to hear it talked about as something that might only arrive in a few decades’ time, at best.
The most imaginative parts of the political left might have at least some of the answers – but there again, they still seem far too reluctant to confront more troubling matters. One is screamingly obvious: free movement may be an inevitable feature of a world shrinking at speed, but people have good reason to worry about it, and their anger and anxiety will not go away.
I have no idea what result will be announced next Friday. But at the centre of where we find ourselves there is an undeniable irony, which may yet turn cold and cruel. If the revolt succeeds and Brexit wins, the party in power is likely to take a political turn that will lead us even further away from what the moment demands, while Labour will likely tumble further into division and introspection.
On that score, a quotation flips into my mind so often these days that I ought to have it printed on a T-shirt, or possibly present it to a tattooist. Nearly a century ago, when the workers were increasingly restive, and his part of the planet was once again tipping towards chaos and disaster, that great European Antonio Gramsci wrote: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new is yet to be born. And in the interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
John Harris
* The Guardian. Friday 17 June 2016 06.30 BST Last modified on Friday 24 June 2016 13.32 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/17/britain-working-class-revolt-eu-referendum
The UK is now two nations, staring across a political chasm
Leave voters aren’t lemmings jumping off a cliff, and the left urgently needs to understand their choices.
What a strange, unsettling, anxious moment this is. I mean that partly in the sense of vote, but also of the emotions that are still raw after the death of Jo Cox, and what the last month or so has highlighted about the state of what we must still call the United Kingdom. Many people knew the rough story, of course: of a country cleaved by rising inequality, prone to great outbursts of anger and frustration, and now in the midst of its own version of US-style culture wars – a picture, in fact, that now applies to much of Europe, and is coming into even sharper focus in America itself. But if the build-up to the referendum has told us anything, it is that all this has reached a disturbing peak.
On Tuesday I was in Northampton’s market square, and finding leave voters was a cinch. One or two, just to make this clear, were plain racist, but the majority were not: they talked about immigration, but in the context of jobs, housing and all the rest. An hour later I was on a London tube train sprinkled with successful-looking professionals, a few of whom had “Stronger in” stickers on their Herschel rucksacks and laptop bags. They would presumably echo the views of leave voters that a young woman about to go to university had expressed in Northampton. She talked about their supposed view of immigrants: “They think they’re stealing our jobs … bringing in crime and terrorism. It’s just nonsense.”
Two nations, in short, are staring at each other across a political chasm. To make things worse, while the rightwing press have been up to their usual disgraceful tricks, the parts of the media that might offer a counterbalance have mostly failed to understand that it is the restive mood of millions of people – not David Cameron or Jeremy Corbyn, or the late entry into the debate of David Beckham – that is the referendum’s main story. In the last week or so, this problem has turned nuclear: the awful events in Birstall have made “hate” a ubiquitous trope, and the prospect of any real understanding of the national mood has receded even further.
Broadcast journalism has a lot to answer for here. Far too much political coverage has only one way of framing its subject: riding the battlebuses, fixating on the polls, and being so obsessed with each side’s supposed figureheads that the whole thing starts to look like gladiatorial sport (witness Tuesday’s utterly absurd debate in that well-known home of meaningful discourse, Wembley Arena). In turn, in the wider world, that feeds into a tendency to conflate parties and campaigns with the people who vote for them. The result: people who want out are perceived as being made from the same stuff as the nastier elements of the leave campaign, endlessly ready to be “whipped up” into a steaming rage, and therefore worthy of the same mixture of bafflement and contempt.
This then blurs out into the online voices that these days act as the media’s outer ring. On Twitter last weekend I had a brief exchange with someone who said that Nigel Farage’s unbelievably ugly “Breaking point” poster stunt amounted to “mass hysteria”, to which there was only one reply. No, it was just one man standing in front of a poster. The reality of the coalition of people voting leave is much more complex and confounding – “hysteria” is the kind of word that speaks of a huge set of misunderstandings.
But these misapprehensions run deep, not least on the political left. Even those who understand that something seismic is afoot among predominantly working-class voters are still too keen on the idea that they are gullible enough to be led over a cliff by people with whom they would actually disagree, if only they knew the facts. But most people are not really being “led” by anyone. In my experience, Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove et al are viewed by most people with as much cynicism as the people fronting the remain campaign. Moreover, this argument is dangerously redolent of that lousy old Marxist trope of “false consciousness”, whereby people enthusiastically following the supposedly wrong cause are only a speech or poster away from enlightenment, and a sharp left turn.
We need to face up to two things. First, a lot of people want out of the EU because they are worried and angry about the consequences of the free movement of people, and in that sense they have made their choice rationally. Second, even if Farage, Johnson and Gove would doubtless use Brexit as an opportunity to further our journey towards an essentially sink-or-swim society, there are plenty of working-class voters who would probably go along with that.
I don’t write either of those things with any relish – I’m a remain voter who loathes modern Conservatism. But if my side of politics is even going to begin to revive itself, bracing thoughts like those are surely going to be obligatory.
Labour lost Scotland over the last decade, thanks partly to the very same mess of inequality, voicelessness, professionalised politics and dysfunctional economics that is now tearing England and Wales in two (or even three, or four). Thanks to a nationalism that was social-democratic and civic, politics was aligned in a generally progressive direction. The Scots’ political reformation underlined the sense that neoliberalism doesn’t work.
But what is now happening elsewhere in the UK underlines a tangle of other stuff – to do with culture, belonging and community – that is going to require a completely different level of response.
Even if the remain side wins, it will not say anything much about the essential condition of the country, aside from underlining how divided we are. So please: in that event, no crowing about a resounding triumph, or delusional thinking about a country miraculously restored by the weekend to a state of political harmony. We are in a terrible mess, and it is probably going to take decades to even begin to put things right.
John Harris
* The Guardian. Thursday 23 June 2016 06.00 BST Last modified on Friday 24 June 2016 13.30 BST:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/17/britain-working-class-revolt-eu-referendum