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.
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