If you think Trump is bad, wait until you see what comes next

 In it's coverage of the US election, the British media has largely focused on personalities.  In doing so, it is impossible not to spend a lot of airtime talking about the flamboyant (to put it mildly) personality of billionaire former Apprentice host Donald Trump.  A great deal of this is the result of Trump’s own overt racism and misogyny.  But the Clinton campaign has a good deal of responsibility for this too.  This is because they are running a carbon copy of David Cameron’s failed Brexit campaign.

Hillary Clinton is the US Remain candidate; the self-proclaimed safe pair of hands who will maintain business as usual for the next four years.  Like the British Remain campaign, there is no vision of the bright future that Americans can look forward to if Hillary wins.  Instead, the mainstay of the campaign is about just how awful her opponent is, and just how horrible things are going to be if people are dumb enough to vote for him.

As David Cameron discovered – to his, and our, cost – there comes a point when your austerity policies have ground a sufficient number of faces into the mud, that people will vote against anything that the government supports… even Brexit… even Donald Trump.

The problem for those of us on the eastern side of the North Atlantic is that our media rarely reports on the domestic politics of the USA.  This leaves us fondly believing that the presidential election is something akin to a British general election.  Trump and the Republicans are assumed to be something like the UK Tory party, while Clinton and the Democrats are assumed to be like Labour.  In reality, Bill Clinton did to the Democratic Party what Tony Blair failed to do to New Labour; turning it into the centre right, establishment party.  This forced the Republicans to breakdown into an approximation of UKIP, containing warring factions of Tea Party head-bangers, Christian fundamentalists and gun fanatics… although still presided over by Washington insiders who had no intention of ever delivering on the  promises they made to their followers.

A more accurate way of viewing the current US election would be to imagine a contest between Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Farage.  Seen in this way, you begin to understand why so many women and black voters look set to stay at home, even if this gives the presidency to someone as hateful as Trump.  It is why at least a minority of Bernie Sanders’ supporters look likely to actually vote for Trump, while many more will support Jill Stein.  And it is why, despite all of the Trump scandals, not only is he still in the race, but he appears to be overtaking Clinton.

Dig beneath the surface of the official statistics that the Clinton campaign uses to claim that all is well with the US economy, and you discover a more disturbing picture.  While those fortunate enough to hold salaried positions within the orbits of Wall Street, the Washington Beltway and Silicon Valley continue to enjoy six- and seven-figure salaries and all of the benefits of a globally integrated economy, Middle America has been decimated.  As American essayist John Michael Greer observes:

“I suspect that a great many financially comfortable people in today’s America have no idea just how bad things have gotten here in the flyover states. The recovery of the last eight years has only benefited the upper 20% or so by income of the population; the rest have been left to get by on declining real wages, while simultaneously having to face skyrocketing rents driven by federal policies that prop up the real estate market, and stunning increases in medical costs driven by Obama’s embarrassingly misnamed “Affordable Care Act.” It’s no accident that death rates from suicide, drug overdose, and alcohol poisoning are soaring just now among working class white people. These are my neighbors, the people I talk with in laundromats and lodge meetings, and they’re being driven to the wall.”

One cannot help but notice the similarities that underlay the British vote to leave the European Union.  As Guardian journalist John Harris warned in the weeks leading up to the vote:

“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…

“In Stoke, Merthyr, Birmingham, Manchester and even rural Shropshire, the same lines recurred: so unchanging that they threatened to turn into clichés, 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.”

Promising business as usual to millions of families in the respective rust belts of the UK and USA is simply not going to work.  All of the hope that swept Obama into office has been spent.  Nobody is listening to the political class anymore because (just like Tony Blair’s fictitious “third way”) it was a confidence trick.  As Greer points out:

“The talking heads insisted that handing over tax dollars to various corporate welfare queens would bring jobs back to American communities; the corporations in question pocketed the tax dollars and walked away. The talking heads insisted that if working class people went to college at their own expense and got retrained in new skills, that would bring jobs back to American communities; the academic industry profited mightily but the jobs never showed up, leaving tens of millions of people buried so deeply under student loan debt that most of them will never recover financially. The talking heads insisted that this or that or the other political candidate would bring jobs back to American communities by pursuing exactly the same policies that got rid of the jobs in the first place—essentially the same claim that the Clinton campaign is making now—and we know how that turned out.”

When Trump says he is going to tear up the trade treaties that allowed corporations to move people’s jobs to Asia, it resonates.  When he tells Ford’s executives that if they move their factories to Mexico, he will slap a 35% tariff on them so that they will never sell another car in America, it resonates.  When he tells the member states of NATO that they have to pay their fair share if they want to remain in the club, it resonates.  These are the messages that have brought thousands of people to Trump rallies.  They are the messages that the media has largely ignored.

Perhaps it takes a comedian to draw the conclusion that nobody else want to make.  US comic Bill Burr (contains swearing) points out that:

 “If Trump wasn’t such a jerk-off, it’s really what the country needs.  You need somebody who isn’t part of the f***ing system…”

In this, the Clinton campaign’s decision to focus on Hillary’s long career in politics is backfiring in exactly the same way as Cameron’s decision to use a parade of establishment figures to warn of the dangers of leaving the EU backfired.  When the people – or at least a large enough minority of them – have lost faith in the system, you have to demonstrate how you are going to change things.

Will Trump deliver?  We may never know.  The US Electoral College system awards Hillary Clinton around 100 delegates before the election has begun because of the Democratic Party’s control of California and New York.  Even if Trump wins the popular vote, Clinton is still favourite to win the election.  But Trump can still do it if he is able to swing key states like Florida (where Bush defeated Gore 16 years ago).

While a Trump victory is likely to produce the sort of media hysteria that followed the UK referendum result, Trump is no more likely to be able to deliver on his promises than are the Leavers in the UK.  Trump will have to sway a resentful congress to deliver on his domestic policies.  And while he will have more freedom of movement in foreign affairs, the military-industrial complex is unlikely to roll over if the trillions of dollars of military spending (and all of the jobs that go with it) is threatened.

This hints at a deeper and far more troubling problem.  If Clinton wins – as is most likely – things will stay as they are.  Inequality will increase.  Poverty will worsen.  US taxpayers will continue to bail out a finance and banking industry that should have been allowed to crash eight years ago.  The US will become ever more embroiled in foreign wars from which it has no idea how to extricate itself.  It will continue to support global corporations at the expense of domestic jobs.  It will continue to incarcerate a third or more of its black population.  And gradually, the anger and resentment will grow.

If, on the other hand, Trump wins, it is highly unlikely that he is going to reverse the ills of four decades of globalisation and neoliberalism.  The power of the corporate lobby in Washington more or less guarantees that what few reforms a Trump presidency is able to deliver will favour the already wealthy… most likely at the expense of the poor.  And gradually, the anger and resentment will grow.

As Greer warns us:

“Thus the grassroots movement that propelled Trump to the Republican nomination in the teeth of the GOP establishment, and has brought him to within a couple of aces of the White House in the teeth of the entire US political class, might best be understood as the last gasp of the American dream. Whether he wins or loses next week, this country is moving into the darkness of an uncharted night—and it’s not out of place to wonder, much as Hamlet did, what dreams may come in that darkness.”

Four year from now (if not before) the anti-establishment leader who emerges to take on the Washington insiders is unlikely to have the kind of skeletons that fell out of Trump’s closet on the road to 8^th November.  But he or she may have all of the racism, misogyny and misanthropy of the very worst kind of right-wing populist… a candidate with all of the skills and none of the flaws of Trump.  In the absence of a serious shift in economic and social policy, American democracy would struggle to defeat such a figure… still less outlast one.

Really?!!

Do you remember the night the paramilitary wing of the Conservative Party went around smashing the windows of Polish shops across Britain?  What about that time they set up a socialist sympathiser to burn down the houses of parliament?  Perhaps you remember how they used that incident as a pretext to ban opposition parties and to arbitrarily detain anyone considered to be a political opponent?  What about that night when they rounded up many of their own supporters and had them shot?

No, nor me. 

But reading articles on the blogosphere, posts on social media, and listening to comments from people who should know better, you might be forgiven for thinking that Britain had recently experienced some kind of Nazi coup.

These sentiments trivialise the experience of the millions of people who suffered and died at the hands of the Nazis in the 13 years that the “Thousand Year Reich” existed.  Putting yourself on a par with Europe’s murdered Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, disabled children and people with mental illness because your country is about to adopt the immigration policy operated by the EU, but on a national level arguably amounts to Holocaust denial and is at best an example of the childish whining of affluent liberal privilege that lets the Tories and their paymasters off the hook.

This aside, the idea that anything much has changed about the Conservative Party – or those factions in the UK that they appeal to – is little more than a collective lapse of memory.  The Tories always were the party of imperialism.  They have racism in their blood.  In the 1920s and 30s, they happily ordered the use of chemical weapons against rebellious tribesmen in those parts of the Empire that they could no longer afford to police.  Let us not forget that under the Tories in the 1930s, Jewish refugees were routinely refused asylum in the UK.  Even after war had broken out, in 1940 Churchill ordered the internment of refugees alongside their some of their Nazi oppressors on the Isle of Man.  It was only after the war that the Tory establishment chose to highlight the minority of cases – such as the privately-funded Kindertransports – where Britain did grant refuge, in order to gloss over the way they had actually behaved.

Nor did things improve much after the war.  Does anybody remember Peter Griffiths?  Griffiths was elected to Parliament in the 1964 general election in what should have been the safe Labour seat of Smethwick.  What was the election slogan that is thought to have swung thousands of traditional Labour voters behind him?  “If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.”  Four years’ later we had Enoch Powell’s notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech.  And in the 1970s and 1980s we had to put up with the casual racism of the Thatcherites – remember Norman Tebbit’s “cricket test”?  What about Teddy Taylor calling for Nelson Mandela to be shot?  Let us not forget that the Thatcher government – apparently regarding Powell’s warning as a target – managed to kick off race riots in such places as St. Pauls, Brixton, Handsworth and Toxteth.  And that strand of Tory racism didn’t end in the 1980s either.  More recently, we were treated to Zac Goldsmith’s attempt to channel  Peter Griffiths in the campaign to become London Mayor.

Beyond party politics, anyone who stood on a football terrace in the 1970s and 1980s will be thoroughly confused by the idea that there is anything new about racism and racial hatred among Britain’s working class.  Indeed, prior to the Race Relations Act, trade unionists were often among the worst supporters of racial division and discrimination – particularly at the workplace and branch level.

No doubt black and minority communities that have suffered decades of both institutional and casual racism will also be wondering why it is that middle England has only just discovered that racism is a thing.  

As Ian Leslie at the New Statesman says of middle class liberal shock:

“One way to think about the [Brexit] vote is that it has forced a slightly more equitable distribution of anxiety and alienation upon the country…  I feel like a big decision about my life has been imposed on me by nameless people out there. But of course, this is exactly how many of those very people have been feeling for years, and at a much higher level of intensity.”

Sadly, the failure of social democracy (which we are seeing across the developed world) to respond to the needs of working class people in the ex-industrial regions has helped to fuel the emergence of extreme right wing populist parties like UKIP, Golden Dawn and the Five Star Movement.  In the UK this has not been helped by 40 years of politicians from all parties blaming Europe for every unpopular policy they chose to implement, while shouting at the top of their lungs that there was no alternative.

What is less obvious is that the centre-right is also in crisis.  David Cameron only promised the Brexit referendum as a device to win voters from UKIP in May 2015.  He no doubt assumed that he would find himself in another coalition with the LibDems, who would force him to drop the proposed referendum.  When this backfired, he blithely assumed that he could win the referendum using the same “project fear” that won the Scottish independence referendum. Given the choice between business as usual and a gamble that things just might improve by leaving the EU, 17.5 million Britons voted to leave.  (Still, at least UKIP is in meltdown – so we can congratulate Cameron for achieving one of his aims).

Teresa May is, of course, desperately trying to clear up the mess.  A large part of this project involves making the requisite noises on immigration to appease the sizeable UKIP tendency within the Tory Party while she desperately seeks a way of delivering a form of Brexit that meets the needs of the Tories’ elite corporate backers.  The reason that, for May just like Humpty Dumpty, “Brexit means whatever I want it to mean” is precisely because the moment anyone writes down what it actually means, the Tory Party will rip itself apart.  Anything short of a complete and unequivocal withdrawal from the EU will send the head-bangers rushing for the exit.  Anything short of full access to the single market (with all that that implies) will send the centrists over to the Blairites, LibDems and (out of self-interest) the SNP, with the possibility of an anti-Brexit national government.

It is hardly a coincidence that the left is also split.  Neither the Blairites nor the Momentum movement has put forward a realistic alternative to the Tories.  Nor is it likely that the millions of working class voters who haven’t been roused to join the Labour Party in order to back Corbyn (still less Owen Smith) are going to twiddle their thumbs until the left finally gets around to developing a manifesto that at the very least addresses the hardships that they have had to put up with for the last couple of decades. In the absence of this alternative, these millions may well be persuaded to tip the balance once more in favour of a right-wing agenda.

Herein, perhaps, is the most important lesson we should draw from the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.  For while those who wish to associate the current Tory Party with the Nazis are quick to point to the fact that the Nazis were elected (although Adolph Hitler was not – he was roundly defeated in the 1932 Presidential election by Paul Von Hindenberg 53% to 37%); they neglect to point to the fact that the Nazis never had a majority.  The reason they were able to take power was because the much larger German left was divided between the social democrats and the communists, who each chose to regard the other as a greater threat than the Nazis.

Today there is far more common ground in practice between the left social democracy of Corbyn (who is no more a communist than May is a fascist) and the centrist social democratic Blairites within the parliamentary labour party.  Nevertheless, at a moment of extreme national crisis (itself reflecting a growing international crisis) it is the left that has chosen to publicly rip itself apart.

If you are really concerned about fascism you would do well to ignore Teresa May’s Tories altogether.  After all, that particular leopard will never change its spots.  It will play on fear of immigration and hatred of the other to divide and conquer.  But this can only work if it faces a divided opposition that can offer no alternative (beyond turning the clocks back to 1997 or 1983) to speak to the contemporary needs of millions of ordinary people.  As the ill-fated Mr Miliband demonstrated last year, that “alternative” has to be something more radical than standing a cigarette paper’s width to the left of Amber Rudd.

So if you really want to do something that counts, stop empowering the Tories by responding to their agenda.  Instead, start banging some Labour heads together and remind them that this is not about them.  They are there to represent the interests of ordinary working people (the clue is in the name) and if they feel that is too much for their fragile egos to handle, then perhaps like the rest of us when faced with a job we don’t like doing, they should stand down and let someone else take their place.  It is Labour (and Green, SNP, Plaid Cymru and even LibDem) MPs who will determine how this national crisis pans out.  It is about time they got their heads out of their collective arses and got on with the job.

You still don’t get it do you? Europe doesn’t want you back

It is hard to underestimate the shock of the Brexit vote last Thursday.  Nobody expected it… and I mean nobody.  Even Farage had conceded defeat by 11.00pm on Thursday night.  Come Friday morning, the reason pro-Brexit Tories like Johnson and Gove look so glum was that the British people had just handed them a live hand grenade – this was meant to be political theatre in which Vote Leave would graciously lose, and Johnson could go back to his party and say, “well I tried.  Give me the leadership and we’ll do better next time.”  Not for a moment did these people think they were actually going to have to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Since Friday – with the exception of the Parliamentary Labour Party; who have decided that now is the right time to put sordid self-interest ahead of addressing the biggest national crisis since Dunkirk – British politics has been taken up with damage limitation.  Prominent Vote Leave campaigners have made clear that they have absolutely no idea what Brexit means, still less a plan for carrying it out.  Leave voters across the country have come forward to explain that they had only intended their vote as a protest.  Labour MP David Lammy has called for Parliament to end the insanity by simply refusing to accept the referendum result.  LibDem leader Tim Farron has promised to stand at the next election on a manifesto to overturn the Brexit vote.  In the media, even arch-Eurosceptics like the Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie are regretting voting to leave on what has turned out to be an entirely false prospectus.

On the Brexit side of the vote, victory has descended into outbreaks of racial abuse, as foreign nationals have been told to pack their bags and f*** off home!  Britain has held a mirror up to its face and the picture we have seen is ugly and dangerous.

Many of the 48.1% of people who voted to Remain are outraged.  In Scotland, the most likely result is a new independence referendum as the only mechanism for keeping Scotland in the EU.  In the metropolitan cities of England and Wales there have been big pro-EU demonstrations.  Campaign groups have been formed with the explicit aim of overturning the Brexit vote.

In all of this British naval gazing, one ominous fact is being overlooked: THE EU DOES NOT WANT BRITAIN!  That’s right; the EU has reached the end of its tether.  For 40 years they have had to put up with British exceptionalism – opt-outs here, rebates there, and all the while British politicians and journalists blaming all of the ills of their collapsing society on Brussels. 

Although European governments are as concerned about the economic damage caused by the Brexit vote, they at least had the wit to prepare for it.  In Britain, we can thank Bank of England officials for developing contingency measures that an arrogant Prime Minister simply assumed would never be needed.  But there are always advantages in an economic crisis if you can position yourself correctly.  France will be delighted by Britain’s departure – and not just because of all the bad blood from Crecy to Waterloo.  In the EU as currently constituted France is the junior partner among the big three EU economies (Germany, Britain and France).  Take out Britain and the EU becomes a Franco-German duopoly.  Germany – by far the strongest economy in Europe has always looked enviously at the primacy of the City of London as Europe’s financial centre.  With Britain out of the way, and the City no longer bolstered by the economic stability of the single market, Frankfurt can finally emerge as the 21^st century financial capital of Europe.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the world yesterday that: “We can see no way to turn this around.  It's not a time for wishful thinking, but of contemplating the reality” she was not making a legal case.  In fact there are 1001 legal means of preventing withdrawal from the EU from happening.  What Mrs Merkel was really saying was “Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.”  Quite simply, even if British politicians attempt to find a means of reversing the referendum result, EU leaders are not going to allow it – the people have spoken; you must abide by their decision.

The EU is not going to dance to Britain’s tune any more.  As things stand, Britain is clinging by its finger nails to its access to the single market.  It is only the clause that says it has to be Britain that triggers an Article 50 withdrawal that is keeping us there.  EU leaders will bring all the pressure they can to bear upon the next Prime Minister to fire the starting gun as soon as possible.   As Jean-Claude Juncker said yesterday, the next Prime Minister will be given just days to trigger Article 50.  Once that happens, the choice facing Britain is stark – either sign up to all of the things that the referendum result was opposed to – without having a seat at the decision making table – or go trade with someone else.

So that’s it.  Britain is out of the EU.  Not because millions of ordinary Britons wanted it that way, but because given the choice between a union of 27 countries plus one eternal whinger and a union of 27 countries abiding by the same rules, the EU has chosen the latter.

Twenty-six years ago, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper stood on the white cliffs at Dover, put two fingers up toward Europe and shouted “Up Yours Delors” to the then EU Commission President.  Today, Jacques Delors’ children are stood on the white cliffs at Calais returning the complement.  It turns out that it isn’t foreigners who will have to f*** off home… it’s us.

We voted for it; but what – exactly – does Brexit mean?

Why did 52 percent of us vote for Brexit last Thursday?  Although most media attention has focused on immigration, according to a poll by Lord Ashcroft, this was only the second reason given by those who voted to leave.  More important was the belief that decisions about the UK should be taken by the UK.  The third most popular reason was that voting to remain entailed having little choice about how the EU expanded its membership and powers in the future.

Given these concerns, we might expect that the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign would have a blueprint for how these aims are to be achieved now that Britain has indeed voted for Brexit.  Unfortunately, it turns out that there was no such plan – Leave campaigners argued that it was up to 10 Downing Street to create one.  However, the Prime Minister has resigned and is reported to have asked colleagues “why should I stick around to do the hard stuff?”

A small Cabinet Office team (dubbed “the Brexit unit” by the media) has now been assembled to work under Oliver Letwin to sketch out the steps required to trigger an Article 50 notification that will officially inform the EU of Britain’s intention to leave, and will begin the process of establishing the terms under which Britain will leave – note that this is a very long way from a final exit from the EU, which some expect to take a decade or more.

Ideally, before Article 50 is officially triggered, the new Prime Minister will want at least a broad outline of the kind of relationship with the EU Britain will want to negotiate.  This is likely to require a general election to provide the new Prime Minister with the legitimacy to develop a negotiating stance.  The trouble is that unless Article 50 is triggered before a general election, the election is likely to end up being about whether or not to trigger Article 50 at all – if the opposition won on pro-EU manifestos, this would give them the necessary legitimation to overturn the result of the referendum itself.

So the new Prime Minister will have just weeks to decide what Britain’s relationship with the EU is to be after Brexit.  The three options on the table are some modification of:

1. The Norwegian model in which Britain continues to participate in the single market through the European Economic Area. 
2. The Swiss model in which Britain attempts to access the single market by negotiating new bi-lateral trade treaties with each of the remaining 27 EU member states.  The Swiss have been working on their unfinished version of this for the best part of seven decades.
3. World Trade Organisation rules in which Britain effectively tears up all existing rules and seeks a preferred trading status similar to Turkey or Ukraine.

In practice, the first option is worse than ignoring the referendum result, since it entails operating by EU rules over which Britain will have ceded control, continuing to pay into the EU budget, and continuing to allow the free movement of people.  The second option may be little better, since an embittered EU has no incentive to ease Britain’s exit given that this may encourage others to consider referendums of their own.  It may well be that the free movement of people will be a red line issue for any of the EU member states Britain seeks treaties with.

In reality, then, the only option that guarantees that the result of the referendum is enacted is the one in which Britain tears up every agreement that it has entered into in the course of the last 40 years.  That option, unfortunately, is simply insane.

On the international stage, Britain is party to hundreds of international treaties signed by the EU.  Each of these would have to be renegotiated separately by Britain with each of the other signatories.  Nationally, conservative estimates suggest that parliament and the civil service could be tied up for a decade.  As Alex Barker and Alan Beattie in the Financial Times report:

“Senior officials see the untangling of 40 years of EU membership as something akin to a legal “revolution” that would dominate the Queen’s speech for the next five to 10 years.

“This includes deciding what to keep, amend or reject from thousands of EU related laws on the UK statute book and 12,295 regulations that have direct effect and would cease to apply the moment the UK leaves.”

Simply scrapping the European Communities Act 1972 – as suggested by some Vote Leave campaigners – without first updating all of the EU-based law first would leave every business in Britain trading illegally until such time as replacement British law was enacted.  For example:

“Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, points out that much of the trading done in the City of London would overnight become illegal unless new provision were made. The process of reviewing this legislation — working out what to keep, what to amend, and what to remove — would be lengthy, complex, and contested.”

Beyond this written legislation is all of the case law that has developed over four decades.  Philip Kolvin QC sets out the scope of the law related to leaving the EU:

“The consequences for our legal system have barely figured in [the debate on Brexit]. But EU-inspired or mandated legislation is part of the bedrock of societal protection. I speak of health and safety, town and country planning, ecological protection, freedom of information, data protection, competition, discrimination, public procurement, indeed the very concept of proportionality which governs much of our regulatory system. Are these protections to be thrown onto a bonfire of laws? If not, which are to survive and which are to be replaced, and if so by what?”

Presumably, the status quo will have to remain for the decade (or more likely decades) while all of this law is being re-written.  And any changes will have to go through the usual Parliamentary processes... hardly the "scrapping EU bureaucracy" that most Leave voters had in mind.

The effect on future law making is going to be disastrous if large numbers of civil servants have to be relocated to the Brexit Unit to carry out the nuts and bolts of renegotiating and redrafting Britain's legal framework.  Bear in mind that the Civil Service has been parred to the bone as part of the government’s austerity programme.  Trade negotiations will pose significant difficulties, since most of Britain's international trade specialists retired more than thirty years ago because EU membership meant that they were no longer needed.  It might be possible to bring in outside contractors to take on some of the extra work, but this also has its problems, since the multinational law and accountancy firms with the spare capacity to take on this work may prefer more lucrative contracts with the 27 EU member states that Britain is seeking to negotiate with.

Beyond having to spend an inordinate amount of money (perhaps no bad thing if it stimulates the wider economy) time and effort on unpicking and redrafting the best part of 40 years of International and British law, it is far from clear what, exactly, Brexit means.  Ironically for the large racist contingent among Brexit voters, the one thing it does not affect is the status of EU citizens already living in Britain.  Their rights are guaranteed by United Nations treaties that Britain entered into in the aftermath of World War Two.  Quite simply, unless the Brexit camp are prepared to turn Britain into a rogue state – with all the trade sanctions and the potential threat of military action that this would entail – nobody is being deported or forcibly removed.  Indeed, the likely consequence of Brexit is that even more people will obtain joint EU/UK citizenship.

It is far from clear what people thought they were voting for when they voted to leave.  It is even less clear what sort of settlement Britain will eventually reach many years from now.  What is clear is that most Leave voters are going to be sourly disappointed by the end result in any case.

Our UKIP future?

If you were looking for one individual responsible for Thursday’s Brexit vote, you could do a lot worse than single out Neil Kinnock.  It was Kinnock – faced with a wave of working class unrest in the face of a callous Thatcher government – who decided that it was easier to ward off dissent with rule changes rather than arguments.  Beginning the process of disconnecting the Labour leadership from its grass roots, Kinnock lit the fuse than exploded last week.  Kinnock’s reforms paved the way for the war criminal Blair – whose endorsement of the Remain campaign added at least 10% to the Brexit vote.

The harbingers of Thursday’s result were there for anyone who cared to look.  The draining away of the Labour vote (hidden by the lack of a credible Tory party) after the 2001 election.  The rise of the LibDems as a protest vehicle for disgruntled ex-Labour voters in 2010.  The annihilation of Labour in Scotland and the rise of UKIP in the Labour’s former urban and ex-industrial heartlands.  For the most part, Labour MPs had been able to ignore these storm clouds because support among the metropolitan middle classes and the vagaries of the First Past the Post electoral system worked to keep them in office.  But faced with a referendum in which every vote counted, the mass of disenfranchised working class voters took the opportunity to kick the political elite in the only way on offer – Despite the calls of the Labour leadership, the Tory high command, the leaders of big business and high finance, the chose Brexit.

The Parliamentary Labour Party’s (PLP) choice to commit ritual suicide by removing Jeremy Corbyn as leader does nothing to win back the mass of people who voted for Brexit; not least because the PLP is staunchly pro-remain.  Quite rightly, working class voters will see the attempt to change leader as a precursor to ditching the referendum result.  And beyond this, the idea that an already out of touch PLP is going to win seats in constituencies that have long-since ceased being pro-Labour is fantasy.  By removing Corbyn, all they are doing is divesting the party of tens of thousands of metropolitan activists.

In these circumstances, outside Scotland, UKIP is well placed to take swathes of Labour seats in Britain’s most depressed regions.  In this, they will be ably assisted by Boris Johnson who, if he becomes the next Prime Minister, will actively seek to overturn the referendum result.  Johnson’s backsliding over immigration controls; remaining in the single market; and continuing to pay into the EU smack of a betrayal of Brexit voters that is unlikely to be forgiven.

This creates the grounds for an In v Out election in the autumn. 

An election is inevitable given the tiny majority that Johnson will inherit if he becomes leader.  But to heal the division within the Tory party, Johnson will have to back pedal on all of the promises made during the referendum campaign. Labour, under their new leader, will also be fighting on a pro-remain ticket.  But unlike during the referendum campaign, by ditching Corbyn they will have lost many of the activists they depend upon to turn out their voters.

Given the peculiarity of their situation, the Scottish National Party will bolster their support north of the border.  In England and Wales, however, UKIP will emerge as the only pro-Brexit party that voters can rely upon to protect last Thursday’s result.

Close on the heels of such a major political upheaval, it is inconceivable that the Brexit vote is simply going to go back into passivity – staying at home and allowing Labour and the Tories to slug it out.  While the pro-remain vote (already a minority) will be split between Labour, the LibDems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Tory party; the Brexit vote will gravitate to the one party they can be sure will protect the Brexit result.

As we learned in the course of the referendum campaign, jumping up and down and shouting the word “racist” at the top of your voice does absolutely nothing to deter people from voting for a right-wing proposition.  Clearly extolling the virtues of remaining in the EU is not going to work.  Only a serious package of reforms aimed at reversing the growing inequality of the past 40 years can prevent the mass of the working class staying with UKIP.

It is unlikely that UKIP will be in a position to form a government in October.  This said had Britain voted under a proportional electoral system in 2015, we would now have a Tory-UKIP coalition government.  That coalition is a very real possibility in the event of an autumn election… I don’t like it, but I can see no way of avoiding it.

Biggest crisis since Suez? Not even close!

A single word sums up the entire Brexit referendum from start to finish: COMPLACENCY:

• Complacency on the part of David Cameron for including an EU referendum in the 2015 Tory manifesto solely to prevent Tory voters defecting to UKIP. 
• Complacency too in assuming that the coalition with the LibDems would continue, and the referendum promise could be negotiated away as part of a new coalition agreement.
• Complacency on the part of Angela Merkel for unilaterally inviting a million refugees into the EU without considering how this might affect public opinion elsewhere.
• Complacency on the part of the EU leaders who, facing financial and social problems of their own were in no mood to pander to yet more British whinging, still less provide Cameron with genuine EU reforms.
• Complacency on the part of Cameron for assuming that he could sell the non-deal he negotiated with the EU to an increasingly sceptical British public.
• Complacency on the part of the national media – and particularly the BBC – for presenting the entire referendum as a Westminster bubble, “blue on blue” spat to which – as is usually the case with elections – ordinary British people were not invited.
• Complacency on the part of world leaders and establishment figures from Barak Obama and his paymaster Jamie Dimon down to financial industry flunkies like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling for believing that one warning from them would be enough to send a frightened British public running in their droves to vote for the status quo.
• Complacency on the part of the media and the Parliamentary Labour Party for believing there was no need to improve Jeremy Corbyn’s standing by setting him front and centre of a campaign that had to deliver working class votes.
• Complacency, less obviously, on the part of the UKIP leadership who never for a minute dreamed that the British people might actually believe the simplistic oppositional promises that were intended solely to boost their numbers on the EU/Westminster/local and regional government gravy trains.
• Complacency on the part of loony right wing posh boys like Gove and Johnson who, for entirely selfish reasons set about the campaign like a public school debating society exercise in which they were not required to actually believe and of the nonsense issuing from their months, but merely sow sufficient doubt about their opponent’s arguments.

What nobody seemed to notice was that the neoliberal economic project that began in the 1970s had slowly but remorselessly cast aside increasing numbers of ordinary people.  The new globalised economy took ordinary people who had been able to buy a home and raise a family on a single workers’ wage and cast them onto the scrap heap.  All of the temporary fixes – both partners working; lowering living costs by importing cheap goods; taking on unsustainable debt – failed one by one until all but the top 10 percent were still benefiting. For decades, the Westminster elite and the metropolitan middle classes had been studiously ignoring the growing numbers of down and outs piling up in the shop doorways they passed on their way to get their morning lattes.  Out of sight, a mass of people on the losing side of society had been festering in social housing ghettos from which there is no way out.

Labour’s decision to make these people pay the cost of the 2008 banking crash undoubtedly sealed the result of the referendum.  The warning signs have been clear enough to anyone who chose to look since then.  The LibDem becoming a depository for protesting ex-Labour voters in 2010, coupled to a large number who stayed at home propelled Cameron into Downing Street – “turkeys voting for Christmas” was the conclusion of those within the Westminster bubble.  And it got worse.  In the face of LibDem treachery, the working class protest vote went to UKIP while even more ex-Labour voters stayed at home.  In Scotland, where the SNP offered a social democratic alternative, UKIP went nowhere even as Labour were annihilated.

 “Turkeys voting for Christmas” was once again the Westminster bubble conclusion.  Perhaps this wasn’t turkeys voting for Christmas at all.  Perhaps this was more a case of Westminster bubble insiders putting their hands into the cage in the belief that they were stroking a domesticated kitten, only to discover that they were about to get badly bitten by an extremely irate British lion.  

As protest votes go, this one is a real humdinger!  People who have only ever been able to cast protest votes in the past were asked last Thursday to engage in an existential vote on Britain’s future.  But instead of rationally considering the issues and arriving at a considered conclusion, many (most?) voters appear to have treated the referendum as an opportunity to give a hefty kick to the exposed backside of the global elite.  Yes there was racism, and no doubt unconsciously racist views are held by a large number of us.  But I cannot believe that 52 percent of the people of Britain are racists.  Rather, they were lied to by a bunch of UKIP and Tory chancers who pedalled the lie that all of the ills they were experiencing – the crowded schools and hospitals, zero-hours low-paid work, housing shortages, inadequate policing, punitive social services and insufficient social security – were down to a hoard of EU nationals coming to simultaneously take their jobs and their benefits.

Those racists who voted leave will be disappointed too, of course.  Not even the most swivel-eyed of the UKIPers would seriously propose leaving the European Economic Area (EEA).  To do so would be to devastate what is left of the British economy.  The trouble is that the cost of staying in the EEA is the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour.  Indeed, within hours of the referendum result, leaders of the Leave campaign were claiming that they never promised to cut immigration at all.  By midday on Friday the leaders of the Leave campaign were in essence shouting “ha ha, fooled you”.  No £350 million per day for the NHS; no replacement money for Wales (which delivered an above average percentage in favour Leave); no new money for schools, doctors, housing or a hundred and one other things that Leave promised to the working class in exchange for their votes.

But the damage is done.  And only now is the full enormity of the problem becoming apparent.  The “establishment” is in turmoil.  It will take time to fully understand the steps that the Bank of England has been taking behind the scenes to shore up the Pound – which plunged to its lowest level since 1985 anyway.  What we do know is that it isn’t acting alone.  The US Federal Reserve, the EU Central Bank and international financial bodies like the International Monetary Fund are clearly cooperating to try to prevent the Brexit vote triggering a full blown global crash from which, given the already precarious state of the global economy, we may never fully recover.

The political consequences are enormous too.  Across Europe the crisis is brewing.  Disgruntled citizens and opposition parties are raising the stakes by demanding referendums of their own.  If these are conceded, it will be incredibly difficult to keep the people in the impoverished regions of southern Europe on board.  At the same time, ordinary people in northern Europe who believe they are paying the cost for bailing out countries like Greece, Spain and Ireland may prove no more likely to support what they see as a failing and unaccountable embryonic super-national state.

In Britain, the crisis is already here.  Cameron’s successor will be picking up the political equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.  Whoever that person turns out to be is going to have to engage in the probably impossible task of disentangling Britain’s 45 year relationship with Europe while leading a party with a tiny majority that is split down the middle; and simultaneously maintaining Britain’s anaemic economy… No wonder Boris Johnson looked so despondent when he realised that Leave had won!

The reverberations have already spread across the UK’s political landscape.  Political parties across the UK have already turned inward, splitting both along Leave/Remain lines and away from the centre.  Tory MPs like Anna Soubry have already gone on the offensive against Boris Johnson; accusing him of using a Leave campaign that he never really believed in to further personal ambition at the cost of the British people’s future.  Meanwhile Labour’s Blairite tendency have decided that the best approach to the biggest existential crisis since Dunkirk is to commit ritual suicide by challenging Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership even though the challenge can only succeed if Corbyn agrees to stand down – tens of thousands of ordinary Labour members, still licking their wounds after a fruitless six weeks pounding the pavements and knocking the doors on the streets where most of the Leave voters live, must be distraught at this latest piece of Westminster bubble amateur dramatics.  More practically, the trades unions that fund Labour will need to consider which side or even which party will best represent their members’ interests in the coming negotiations.

Labour MP David Lammy has called on Parliament to simply reject the result of the referendum (someone had to say it).  Technically Parliament – which is sovereign – can do this, since in law a referendum is only advisory”.  But the political consequences could be devastating; effectively putting an end to the pretence of British democracy.  Even less plausibly, LibDem leader Tim Farron apparently promised to stay in the EU in the event of the LibDems winning the next election… to which most British people will have replied; “oh, we didn’t realise you were still here”.  Indeed, along with the Greens and UKIP themselves, the LibDems are likely to have to divide in response to the referendum result, since it is evident that within Britain’s out-dated First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system, parties can no longer appeal simultaneously to people on both sides of the widening social class chasm revealed last Thursday.  Even UKIP will be obliged to decide whether they are going to turn to false populists like Nuttall and Gill to appeal to the working class, or authoritarian Tories like Farage and Hamilton to appeal to establishment insiders (who provide most of their funding).

Quite understandably, the Scot’s, who voted categorically to remain, and who only voted to stay in the UK two years ago because they were promised this was the only way of remaining in the EU, are now calling for an independence referendum.  In Ireland – the only part of the UK with a land border with the EU – there is a sense of foreboding because that open border was a core part of the peace agreement.  Faced with a split between the largely Unionist pro-leavers and the largely Republican pro-remainers, there is very real concern that this could spiral into the kind of violence last seen in the early 1990s.  In Wales, after continuous rule since the first Welsh assembly election in 1999, Labour managed to produce the largest pro-Leave result in the UK; despite parts of Wales attracting more EU funding than any other region in the UK.  This raises very real questions about whether a Welsh Labour party that has allowed itself to get flabby on the back of the EU gravy train is fit for purpose in a Wales that is about to become dependent upon a right-wing English government for its economic survival.

The Welsh Government is, quite reasonably, demanding a seat next to the Scottish and Northern Irish and UK governments in any negotiations over Britain’s future relationship with the EU.  The Mayor of London might also have to be offered a seat at the table.  This adds additional layers of complexity to a negotiating process that is, in practice, impossible.  Even leaving the negotiations to Westminster will be sufficient to deprive Britain of government in all but name for the best part of a decade.  Just about every civil servant in local, regional and national government will have to be involved to some extent in the minutiae of the negotiations:  “How, exactly will Clause 301(b) ii affect Welsh hill farmers?”  “Doesn’t Clause 223 (a) in the proposed banking treaty with Poland contradict Clause 10 (c) of the Online Monetary Transfer agreement with Spain?” etc, etc. ad nauseum.

Then there is the impact on domestic law.  While in theory, government could (i.e. it has the power to) simply annul all pre-existing EU law; in practice, each change will have to pass through the usual agonisingly slow process of scrutiny in both houses of Parliament; something that can only be achieved – if at all – with the support of all parties or following a fresh mandate in a general election that secures an unlikely much larger majority for the governing party.

While all of this is going on, of course, government will be unable to pass anything other than the most urgent legislation – perhaps no bad thing.  But even emergency legislation may be difficult if it is tied up with pre-existing EU law.  In reality, Britain’s businesses, think-tanks, charities and campaign groups will have to find something else to occupy their time for a generation because government is going to be too busy to listen to them.

It will soon become clear to Leave voters too, that nothing is going to change for the foreseeable future.  Barring a complete economic crash, immigration will continue to rise.  Refugees fleeing the damage done by a thousand British bombs will continue to head in this direction; only now the EU leaders will have less incentive to stand in their way.  Unemployment, underemployment and poorly paid employment will continue to be the norm.  Even if the government maintains benefits at current levels, a falling pound means that prices will rise, effectively cutting the living standards of the poorest people.  Economic growth – barely noticeable prior to the referendum – is likely to disappear for several years as companies relocate to mainland Europe and as ongoing uncertainty deters further inward investment.  This is likely to result in a huge outpouring of anger that could go anywhere.

This has been called the biggest crisis since Suez.  It has even been suggested it could be worse than the crisis that arrived on Britain’s shores in 1940.  I would go further.  I believe that we are embarking on the biggest crisis since Herbert Asquith and Edward Grey almost casually took Britain to war in August 1914 on the promise that “it’ll all be over by Christmas”.  We can only hope that the body count will not be equally high.

This should have been a four horse race

It is now clear that absolutely nothing will have changed on Friday 24 June; irrespective of which way the referendum vote goes.  In law, the referendum is merely advisory – there is no requirement that our sovereign Parliament has to pay any attention to it.  Of course, if there was an overwhelming result for one side or the other, it would be politically difficult to ignore.  But with the polls showing Remain and Leave virtually neck and neck, there is huge scope for political horse trading.

If there is a vote to Leave, it will be so close to 50:50 that our overwhelmingly pro-remain Parliament will find some mechanism to ignore the result – most probably following the example of Ireland, where some frantic renegotiation was followed by a new referendum so that the electorate can vote the correct way.

If there is a vote to stay, nothing changes either.  The result will be so close that the Farages and Johnsons of this world will simply claim they were robbed or that Project Fear unfairly frightened people into voting to Remain.  The leave campaign will no doubt be emboldened in this by the sickening levels of British racism that the referendum has exposed.  As in Scotland following its referendum, far from putting the issue to bed for a generation, it will merely lead to ongoing speculation about the circumstances in which a new referendum will have to be called.  David Cameron – if he is still prime minister – will have achieved none of his aims.  His loony-right back benchers will go on dividing the Tory party and (hopefully) making them unelectable.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the whole exercise from beginning to end has been a complete waste of time, money and energy.  But the deeper reason for this state of affairs is less obvious to most people…  It is the early consensus between the two wings of the British elite that the referendum should ask a simple “in v out” question.  This sounds obvious – keep it simple stupid!  However, it has resulted in considerable anger, division and animosity across the UK that is not going to go away any time soon.  The reason for this is that we have all been obliged to try to shoe-horn ourselves into one of two thoroughly unpleasant right-wing camps.

In fact there are four broad positions in this referendum:

1. Remain because we love the EU just as it is
2. Remain and reform
3. Leave and reform
4. Leave because we love Westminster just as it is.

That queasy sensation that so many of us felt when Tony Blair – hands still stained with the blood of a million Iraqis – was wheeled out to tell us we had to vote to Remain, is precisely because he, Cameron, Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon and all the other representatives of corporate power are in the first of these camps.  These are the people that want to remove democracy and introduce market forces into every aspect of our lives.

Most left Remainers, by contrast, are in the second group.  Best articulated by economist and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis, this group recognises the urgent need to save the EU from itself by ending its constitutional requirement to pursue the neoliberal free market capitalism that failed so spectacularly in 2008.  These are the people who want to save European capitalism from its own folly.

The Leave and reform (Lexit) group see the stay and reform position as hopeless.  Ordinary people have failed to bring about democratic reform in their own countries.  It will be impossible to build support for treaty change across the 28 countries of the EU.  This group is not – as opponents claim – saying that the current UK government (or one led by Boris Johnson) is fine.  Far from it.  This group also favours reforms such as a more proportional electoral system that will make Britain democratic again.

In this, the Lexit group are very different to the pro-Leave (Brexit) campaign led by UKIP and the Tory right.  The Brexit group clearly want to use the Parliamentary dictatorship that the First Past the Post system produces in order to tear apart the few remaining rights that ordinary people still enjoy. They see the flimsy EU Social Chapter as an impediment to full-blown market capitalism; and would support remain if they thought they could remove it.

While we cannot know for sure, I believe that had we been offered a four-horse referendum, the majority of the votes would go to Remain and reform and Leave and reform.  This being the case, I am also pretty sure that the campaign would have been significantly less divisive.  It would expose our hostility toward the corporations and their paid political henchmen who want to destroy democracy in order to make even more profits.  It would expose the right wing fanatics who blame all of our ills on immigrants.  Instead, it would open up a more urgent debate about how best to build democracy and create a society that works in everyone’s interests.

The failure of the left in this referendum stems largely from our inability to give voice to the similarities between the Leave and reform and the Remain and reform camps.  Both seek democracy and justice.  Both have valid arguments to make.  More importantly, both need to find common ground to mount a longer-term campaign after 24 June.  Failing to do so will merely play into the hands of the racist loony-right.

Instead of shouting ‘Racist’ we really need to use the ‘C’ word again

I think we can all agree that the referendum campaign is deteriorating as we get closer to 23 June. A lack of objective facts; both sides playing on our fears; partisan self-interest; and the absence of anyone prepared to give an honest answer have served to bring out the worst in us.

One side, in particular, is cause for concern.  It is the side that refuses to offer any coherent plan for what its version of the future will look like.  It is the side that insists on banging on and on about just one issue; and will continue to do so right up until 10.00pm on voting day.  It is the side that refuses to engage in a serious debate, and instead sticks its proverbial fingers in its ears and hurls insults around in order to stifle discussion of any of the – many – other issues that might be of interest to anyone who is still undecided.  I refer, of course, to the Remain side.

In case anyone hadn’t noticed, what passes as reasoned debate on the remain side consists of telling everyone else how much they will lose out economically if we leave the EU and, when this fails, to shout the word “RACIST” as loudly and as often as they can in order to curtail any further argument.

Accusing your opponents of racism is, after all, hardly designed to encourage an opponent to expand an argument so that it can be analysed and challenged.  It is, however, something more when it is shouted by the liberal wing of a privileged managerial and professional middle class.  In this context, “racist” has always been a dog whistle for the white working class.  To that section of the middle class that continues to enjoy a position of privilege either directly within the public sector or within one of the many corporations that now suck on the teat of state welfare, the term “racist” or the nastier “chav” is a means of drawing a socio-economic dividing line without having to use the “C” word that three decades of identity politics have made taboo – “CLASS”.

Think for a moment about how mass media symbolise a racist (see image above for reference) – the working class thug with a skinhead haircut, the flag of St George T-shirt, the word “hate” tattooed on his (it is always a he) knuckles.  It is nothing more than a derogatory stereotype of the working class – racism is seldom symbolised, for example, as the CEO of one of the many corporations that routinely and systematically exclude black and Asian people (and women) from employment; particularly at the upper end of the career ladder.  Unconsciously, we have been encouraged to regard being white and working class and being a racist as the same thing.  And it has one extremely pernicious consequence – it allows the privileged minority to shout down the majority.

Four decades of Thatcherism and its bastard New Labour offspring have caused a growing class divide in Britain.  But during those years, we all but stopped talking about class, precisely because a privileged managerial and professional class were doing very nicely out of the deal.  Identity politics became a necessary means of papering over this fact, since superficially, identity cuts across the class divide.  In reality, identity politics is a means of curtailing all discussion of class.  As an illustration of this, in an article of the failure of modern feminism, Eleanor Robertson relates her experience attending a conference session on sexism in the workplace:

“I shifted in my seat, waiting for someone to bring up public daycare, or government-funded parental leave, or the proliferation of underpaid pink-collar jobs, or the economic devaluation of women’s reproductive labour, or any of the issues that have historically been sites of feminist struggle.

“Nobody did, so I raised my hand to mention my sister, who is a part-time childcare worker. How would training women to ask for higher pay help her, as someone who earns a set award wage and has very little power to negotiate anything? How would professional mentoring empower her? How would her life be improved by quotas for women on boards?

“A mildly uncomfortable pause followed. I ploughed on, motivated half by an immediate anxiety about filling the conversational gap and half by raw indignation. Shouldn’t our demands be for universal changes to the structure of society that will help all women, I asked. There was a subdued murmur of assent, and a couple of women voiced agreement. But the matter was soon forgotten, and I spent the rest of the session in a state of tense disappointment.”

Nobody – not even Robertson herself – actually mentions the “C” word.  Nevertheless, the unconscious line in the sand being drawn at the conference was a class division.  There are the salaried managerial and professional women – the kind that can afford the time out to attend conferences on career enhancement – and then there are the wage-earning working class women, like Robertson’s sister who, for a host of practical and financial reasons are unlikely ever to attend such a conference; still less benefit from it.

When Remain supporters shout the word “racist” at the top of their voices, they are drawing the same class dividing line.  The fact of the matter is that the largely pro-remain managerial and professional class have benefited from immigration.  After all, without it we wouldn’t be able to afford all of those trades people who carry out the repairs on our houses; or the hospital workers who keep the cost of the NHS down sufficiently that we do not have to pay more income tax for it; or the various emergency and utility workers who keep our cities running without us incurring huge council tax bills; or even the cheap temporary foreign workers who keep the price of food at Waitrose significantly lower than if we paid a half decent wage to agricultural workers.

Consider the other side of that equation – working people whose living standards have fallen remorselessly since the 1970s; working people who can barely afford the rent on a rundown inner city flat, let alone even think about owning a home of their own;  working people who have been failed by an education system that was deliberately designed to serve managerial and professional privilege (yes, it has been expanded to allow the banks to turn more of our young people into debt serfs; but the graduates from the handful of universities and courses that really matter are today even more likely to be the sons and daughters of privilege); working people who have been on the sharp end of every cut in public services that has been inflicted since the birth of Thatcherism: the crowded classrooms, overstretched GPs, absent dentists, useless social services, inadequate and punitive policing, obstructive social security systems, absence of public spaces, etc.

The working class do not have an “immigrant problem” of course – but it is all too easy to view their concerns through the prism of racism:

“Despite the vocal discussion on immigration during the EU Referendum, animosity is not being expressed towards European immigrants.  It is common to hear people say that there is too much immigration but they “like working with the Polish, they’re alright” or “I would do the same if I was them”.  Typical complaints focus on the difficulty in getting a quick doctors appointment or an over-crowded classroom. People see their workplaces, towns and villages change around them and they were never consulted, asked or involved in any way.”

In my book The Consciousness of Sheep, which is about the profound crisis facing all of Western civilisation – written before we had a Tory government, still less a referendum – I observed that:

“Several factors have combined to undermine people’s livelihoods and to plunge ever more people into poverty.  Government attempts to reverse the deficit and run budget surpluses suck money out of the productive economy.  In such depressed conditions, right-wing anti-immigrant parties can gain traction by selling the narrative that the problem is the result of immigrants unfairly competing for jobs.”

Of course the Vote Leave campaign is going to play the immigrant card as loudly as they possibly can, in exactly the same way as the Remain campaign will continue to play their economic Armageddon card.  That is what political opportunism does.  But the issue that we must address does not concern the referendum itself – we must come to terms with the massive gulf that has opened up across the Western world between the elites and their managerial and professional class running dogs on the one hand, and an increasingly impoverished working class on the other… failing to do so risks pushing them further into the arms of right-wing false populism.

In a pro-Remain column, Polly Toynbee stumbles upon the nub of the issue:

“Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere. Warn these Labour people what a Johnson/Gove government would do and they don’t care. Warn about the loss of workers’ rights and they don’t listen – maybe that’s already irrelevant to millions in crap jobs such as at Uber or Sports Direct.”

People in the managerial and professional class – especially those within the Labour Party – simply assume the British working class are “Labour people” (as if that is stamped somewhere on their birth certificates).  What they cannot entertain – because it threatens their own privilege – is that the British working class had already become an explosive mix of anger and frustration long before the referendum was announced.  Labour can no longer assume that this automatically translated into votes for them.  They need to provide a positive vision:

“For a start labour movement activists have to stop dodging working class objections to low-wage inward migration, or assuming it can all be resolved by an appeal to anti-racism.”

John Harris, who has recently toured the UK getting people’s view on the referendum, is clear that the rift that has opened up in British society is about class not bigotry:

“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…

“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?”

Former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan both gets the deeper issue, and unconsciously discloses one of its causes:

“There is an anti-politician mood out there at the moment.  Even retired politicians like me face it.  People are anti-establishment. There is a rampant Them and Us divide.”

This is undoubtedly true.  But notice that seemingly innocuous “out there”.  That, too, is a dog whistle for the class divide.  The “out there” that politicians and pundits talk about is precisely those urban and ex-industrial regions where the working class lives.

It was ever thus, of course.  In the days before Thatcherism, nobody would expect anything other than that the British working class (or at least a large part of it) would be “anti-establishment”.  When working people fought and lost the miners’ strike in 1984/5 they were being anti-establishment, just as they were when they defeated Thatcher on the hated Poll Tax, and when they took on Churchill in the miners’ strikes in 1926 and 1944 (yes we had strikes in the war).  Chartism, the Merthyr Rising, Red Clydeside, the election of Annie Powell  and the National Health Service were all examples of working people being anti-establishment.  But back in those days, the Labour Party both embraced and provided a political focus for that anti-establishment sentiment.

What the referendum campaign has revealed is that Britain’s working class still is an anti-establishment force.  After 35 years of being ignored by the establishment even as their living standards collapsed, a significant proportion of them are prepared to tear down the whole national and European political edifice if that is what it takes to get a hearing.

As Andy Shaw succinctly puts it:

“The commentators and what now passes for ‘left wing’ activists have no relationship with the working class. They are shocked that the EU Referendum has ignited interest, discussion and passion. Their detachment from ordinary people means that they misunderstand their motivation. They genuinely fear the people because, up until now, they have been able to ignore them. If you live in a reified world where the only views you hear are within an echo chamber of reinforcing group-think, it is a shock to realise that most people do not think the way you do.”

The Labour Party in particular must consider its role in abandoning so many of the people it blithely considers to be “Labour people”.  Between 1997 and 2010, Labour presided over a widening class divide that its policies accelerated.  When the inevitable crash in New Labour’s “relaxed about people getting filthy rich” casino economy came, Labour’s true class affiliation was all too clear – they sacrificed the people in order to save their friends in the City.  And while Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been rewarded with sinecures in the global banking industry, the people have been left to shoulder the burden of austerity.

Whichever way the vote goes on Thursday, the deeper class divide in British society will continue to widen.  In the absence of a positive vision for the future, abandoned by the left, the British working class – like their American and European counterparts – will continue along the path of false populism.  It is an ugly vision of the future.  But if the best we can do is put our fingers in our ears and shout “racist”; it is the future that we are most likely to get.