'If
you've got money, you vote in ... if you haven't got money, you vote
out'
Brexit
is about more than the EU: it’s about class, inequality, and voters
feeling excluded from politics. So how do we even begin to put
Britain the right way up?
John Harris
@johnharris1969
Friday 24 June 2016
18.01 BST
If you’ve got
money, you vote in,” she said, with a bracing certainty. “If you
haven’t got money, you vote out.” We were in Collyhurst, the
hard-pressed neighbourhood on the northern edge of Manchester city
centre last Wednesday, and I had yet to find a remain voter. The
woman I was talking to spoke of the lack of a local park, or
playground, and her sense that all the good stuff went to the
regenerated wonderland of big city Manchester, 10 minutes down the
road.
Only an hour
earlier, I had been in Manchester at a graduate recruitment fair,
where nine out of 10 of our interviewees were supporting remain, and
some voices spoke about leave voters with a cold superiority. “In
the end, this is the 21st century,” said one twentysomething. “Get
with it.” Not for the first time, the atmosphere around the
referendum had the sulphurous whiff not just of inequality, but a
kind of misshapen class war.
And now here we are,
with that terrifying decision to leave. Most things in the political
foreground are finished, aren’t they? Cameron and Osborne. The
Labour party as we know it, now revealed once again as a walking
ghost, whose writ no longer reaches its supposed heartlands. Scotland
– which at the time of writing had voted to stay in the EU by 62%
to 38% – is already independent in most essential political and
cultural terms, and will presumably soon be decisively on its way.
Sinn Féin is
claiming that the British government “has forfeited any mandate to
represent the economic or political interests of people in Northern
Ireland”. These are seismic things to happen in peacetime, and this
is surely as dramatic a moment for the United Kingdom as – when?
The postwar datelines rattle through one’s mind – 1979, 1997,
2010 – and come nowhere near.
Because, of course,
this is about so much more than the European Union. It is about
class, and inequality, and a politics now so professionalised that it
has left most people staring at the rituals of Westminster with a
mixture of anger and bafflement. Tangled up in the moment are howling
political failures that only compounded that problem: Iraq, the MPs’
expenses scandal, the way that Cameron’s flip from big society
niceness to hard-faced austerity compounded all the cliches about
people you cannot trust, answerable only to themselves (something
that applied equally to the first victims of our new politics, the
Liberal Democrats).
Most of all, Brexit
is the consequence of the economic bargain struck in the early 1980s,
whereby we waved goodbye to the security and certainties of the
postwar settlement, and were given instead an economic model that has
just about served the most populous parts of the country, while
leaving too much of the rest to anxiously decline. Look at the map of
those results, and that huge island of “in” voting in London and
the south-east; or those jaw-dropping vote-shares for remain in the
centre of the capital: 69% in Tory Kensington and Chelsea; 75% in
Camden; 78% in Hackney, contrasted with comparable shares for leave
in such places as Great Yarmouth (71%), Castle Point in Essex (73%),
and Redcar and Cleveland (66%). Here is a country so imbalanced it
has effectively fallen over.
For six years now,
often with my colleague John Domokos, I have been travelling around
the UK for our video series Anywhere But Westminster, ostensibly
covering politics, but really trying to divine the national mood, if
such a thing exists. I look back, and find all sorts of auguries of
what has just happened. As an early warning, there was the temporary
arrival of the British National party in electoral politics from 2006
onwards, playing on mounting popular anger about immigration from the
EU “accession states”, in the midst of Gordon Brown’s
“flexible” job market, and a mounting housing crisis.
A few years later,
we met builders in South Shields who told us that their hourly rate
had come down by £3 thanks to new arrivals from eastern Europe; the
mother in Stourbridge who wanted a new school for “our kids”; the
former docker in Liverpool who looked at rows of empty warehouses and
exclaimed, “Where’s the work?”
In Peterborough in
2013, we found a town riven by cold resentments, where people claimed
agencies would only hire non-UK nationals who would work insane
shifts for risible rates; in the Ukip heartlands of Lincolnshire, we
chronicled communities built around agricultural work and food
processing that were cleanly divided in two, between optimistic new
arrivals and resentful, miserable locals – where Nigel Farage could
pitch up and do back-to-back public meetings to rapturous crowds.
Even in the cities that were meant to unanimously spurn the very idea
of Brexit, things have always been complicated. Manchester was split
60:40 in favour of remain; in Birmingham last week, I met
British-Asian people who talked about leaving the EU with a similar
passion and frustration to plenty of white people on the same side.
In so many places,
there has long been the same mixture of deep worry and often seething
anger. Only rarely has it tipped into outright hate (on that score, I
recall Southway in Plymouth, and loud Islamophobia echoing around a
forlorn shopping precinct; or the women in Merthyr Tydfil doing laps
of the town centre bellowing, “Get ’em out!” ), but it still
seems to represent a new turn in the national condition. “The
gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked
characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English
soil,” wrote George Orwell in 1941. Not now, surely?
What defines these
furies is often clear enough: a terrible shortage of homes, an
impossibly precarious job market, a too-often overlooked sense that
men (and men are particularly relevant here) who would once have been
certain in their identity as miners, or steelworkers, now feel
demeaned and ignored. The attempts of mainstream politics to still
the anger have probably only made it worse: oily tributes to
“hardworking families”, or the the fingers-down-a-blackboard
trope of “social mobility”, with its suggestion that the only
thing Westminster can offer working-class people is a specious chance
of not being working class anymore.
And all the time,
the story that has now reached such a spectacular denouement has been
bubbling a way. Last year, 3.8 million people voted for Ukip. The
Labour party’s vote is in a state of seemingly unstoppable decline
as its membership becomes ever-more metropolitan and middle class,
problems the ascendancy of Jeremy Corbyn has seemingly made worse.
Indeed, if the story of the last few months is of politicians who
know far too little of their own supposed “core” voters, the
Labour leader might be seen as that problem incarnate. The trade
unions are nowhere to be seen, and the Thatcher-era ability of
Conservatism to speak powerfully to working-class aspiration has been
mislaid. In short, England and Wales were characterised by an
ever-growing vacuum, until David Cameron – now surely revealed as
the most disastrous holder of the office in our democratic history –
made the decision that might turn out to have utterly changed the
terms of our politics.
Boris Johnson and
David Cameron: the last four months has been a catastrophic contest
between two men who went to the same exclusive school. Photograph:
Reuters
The prime minister
evidently thought that the whole debate could be cleanly started and
finished in a matter of months. His Eton contemporary Boris Johnson –
and, really, can you believe that the political story of the last
four months has effectively been a catastrophic contest between two
people who went to the same exclusive school? – opportunistically
embraced the cause of Brexit in much the same spirit. What they had
not figured out was that a diffuse, scattershot popular anger had not
yet decisively found a powerful enough outlet, but that the staging
of a referendum and the cohering of the leave cause would deliver
exactly that. Ukip were held back by both the first-past-the-post
electoral system, and the polarising qualities of Farage, but the
coalition for Brexit effectively neutralised both. And so it came to
pass: the cause of leaving the EU, for so long the preserve of cranks
and chancers, attracted a share of the popular vote for which any
modern political party would give its eye teeth.
Of course, most of
the media, which is largely now part of the same detached London
entity that great English patriot William Cobbett called “the
thing”, failed to see this coming. Their world is one of photo ops,
the great non-event that is PMQs, and absurd debates between figures
that the public no longer cares about. The alienation of the people
charged with documenting the national mood from the people who
actually define it is one of the ruptures that has led to this
moment: certainly, wherever I go, the press and television are the
focus of as much resentment as politics. While we are on the subject,
it is also time we set aside the dismal science of opinion polling,
which should surely now stick to product testing and the like.
Understanding of the country at large has for too long been framed in
percentages and leading questions: it is time people went into the
country, and simply listened.
We all know the
cruel irony that sits in the midst of all this story: that Britain –
or what is left of it – will now take a sharp turn to the right,
and the problems that have fed into this moment will only get worse.
Well, there we are. History is rarely logical; until it really bites
them, a lot of people will probably be more supportive of the kind of
super-Thatcherism we may well be subjected to than a lot of other
people would like. More to the point, if England and Wales have taken
a drastic turn towards uncertainty and dysfunction, it will not be
the first time. It is a difficult point to make at a moment like
this, but politics will – must – go on. If we fear not just what
this decision means for our country but how much it says about
Britain’s underlying social condition, we will have to fight. But
first, we will have to think, probably more deeply than ever.
Orwell wrote his
masterful text The Lion and the Unicorn when Europe was tearing
itself apart, and the UK’s isolation was more a matter of righteous
principle than political chaos. England, he said, “resembles a
family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep
in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich
relations who have to be kowtowed to and poor relations who are
horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about
the source of the family income.”
With the under-25s
having so obviously supported one side, and older people the other,
the next line is prescient beyond words: “It is a family in which
the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the
hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.” And his last
line is just as good: “A family with the wrong members in control –
that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a
phrase.”
With Farage crowing
and Johnson and Gove exultant, those words take on a whole new power.
And for those of us who woke to the most awful news imaginable, they
imply a question we should probably have been asking long before this
happened: how do we even begin to put England – and Wales – the
right way up? Think about that woman in Collyhurst: “If you’ve
got no money, you vote out.” Therein lies not just the
against-the-odds triumph of the leavers, but evidence of huge
failures that the stunned mainstream of politics has only just begun
to acknowledge, let alone do anything about.
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