From Top To Bottom: Some Thought’s On Britain’s Brexit Nightmare.

How Did That Happen! The vote to leave the EU poses a direct threat to the futures of Neoliberalism’s expensively credentialed children. Like no other use of the ballot box in their lifetimes, it has frightened the Tops. It’s as if the yobs and the chavs have turned the world upside down, which, in a way, they have.

 

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CRISIS now overtaking Britain is difficult to exaggerate. A society obsessed with class has somehow to deal with the impossible fact that those on the bottom have over-ruled those at the top. Yes, that has happened before in the history of the British Isles: in 1381, 1642, 1832 and 1945. But on all those occasions the Bottom was inspired and supported by a small but crucial faction of progressive Tops. Brexit is different. Brexit has turned the progressive historical tradition on its head. This time the Bottom has thrown in its lot with a rogue faction of reactionary Tops.

 

No one in New Zealand has summed up the situation more succinctly than ex-pat Brit, Josie Pagani. “Nearly every one of the working-class kids I went to school with voted to leave,” she lamented, “while everyone I went to university with voted to remain.” The bare statistics back up Josie’s observation. On the day of the Referendum, the Guardian website affirmed that the factor most closely related to whether a person had voted to Leave or Remain was their level of education.

 

Josie’s heartfelt cry recalled one of my most intense experiences of the 1981 Springbok Tour .

 

A protest crowd had gathered outside the Springbok’s Dunedin hotel. People were angry that the deal Hart had negotiated with the Police, under whose terms protesters were to be allowed within sight of Carisbrook, had been broken. In light rain, they sat down on the street and awaited developments.

 

Pretty soon the “Blue” riot squad emerged from the hotel car-park and jogged into position. Across the street a somewhat smaller crowd of Tour supporters had assembled to watch the fun. “Rug-bee!” they chanted, “Rug-bee!”

 

The Blue Squad commander ordered the protesters to disperse. Nobody moved. He ordered his men to advance, halting them at the very edge of the sit-down demonstration. From somewhere in the crowd, someone started singing the national anthem.

 

The officer in command looked at the crowd. He saw university professors, lawyers and school teachers; frail old ladies and young middle-class students. The lone singer had been joined by others: God of nations, at thy feet, in the bonds of love we meet, hear our voices, we entreat, God defend our free land. The Police commander sighed. Slowly, rank-by-rank, he withdrew his men.

 

The pro-tour crowd fell silent. What was happening? The truck-drivers and shop assistants, freezing workers and bar staff didn’t yet comprehend the slowly emerging truth. The new reality which, by the end of the 1980s, would become frighteningly clear. Their credentials for citizenship weren’t good enough. They no longer counted.

 

The Springbok Tour supporters’ 1981 vote of appreciation to Rob Muldoon’s National Government was the New Zealand Bottom’s last hurrah. Three years later, Rogernomics was unleashed upon New Zealand. To be recognised in the new New Zealand, citizens had to be appropriately credentialed. Educational qualifications, and the political correctness absorbed while acquiring them, were the new model citizen’s indispensable passports to the neoliberal age of globalisation. Those without either were fit only for exploitation and impoverishment. The “dignity of labour” joined words like “solidarity” and “equality” in the dustbin at the end of history.

 

The punishment awaiting Britain’s uncredentialed will be no less savage than that meted out to the “Rug-bee!” chanters of New Zealand. Indeed, it is likely to be even more brutal. The vote to leave the EU poses a direct threat to the futures of Neoliberalism’s expensively credentialed children. Like no other use of the ballot box in their lifetimes, it has frightened the Tops. It’s as if the yobs and the chavs have turned the world upside down, which, in a way, they have.

 

The retribution of the Tops will be swift and unforgiving.

 

Already there is speculation that the ouster of Corbyn is just the opening gambit in a sequence of political moves designed to overturn the referendum result. Labour’s new leader will mobilise the professional middle-class around the party’s demand for an early election. Having secured it, Labour’s will frame the forthcoming vote as a second referendum on Europe. Those who want to stay out of the EU will be invited to vote for Boris Johnson’s Tories. Those wishing to stay in will have only one viable option. The yobs and the chavs will be bought off with a handful of policy sweeteners. A neo-Blairite Labour Party will secure the Tops’ “Remain” mandate, and Britain will be awakened from her Brexit fever dream by the EU’s forgiving kiss.

 

And then the nightmare of the British working-class will begin in earnest.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 June 2016.

Our Man In London.

"I'm calling about Corbyn. Need any help?"

 

PICTURE HIM. He’s in his late 40s, tall, greying hair elegantly styled. His suit is Italian bespoke, from the immigrant tailor with the studio just around the corner from his favourite pub. His basic salary is safely into six figures (Sterling) and his bonus this year was spectacular. What does he do? Basically, he answers questions about the future. Where is the market going? Where will oil be in six months’ time? What’s happening to gold? Who’s putting what where? Which commodities are trending up? What’s going down? It’s not his money, of course, but even so, he’s got to be right at least as often as he’s wrong. Fortunately, he wears the pressure every bit as stylishly as he wears his Italian suit.

 

Not that he’s one of those Old Etonian, Oxbridge toffs like David Cameron or Boris Johnson. No, no. He received his secondary education at the local grammar school and graduated from a respectable red-brick university. Displaying a rare aptitude for student politics, he was swiftly taken up by the leading lights of the University Labour Club. A vacation job in the office of his local Labour MP led him into even higher-powered political circles. Upon graduation a job was waiting for him at Westminster. His boss was only a junior minister outside Cabinet – but widely regarded as a rising star. Our boy rose with him.

 

He met his wife in the lobby of the House of Commons. She was working for a Tory shadow minister of roughly equal rank to his own. Their backgrounds were remarkably similar – apart from the fact that, in her case, it was the University Conservative Club that had spotted her political talents. “Just think,” she teased, “if Labour had been quicker off the mark we might have been colleagues!” They were married on the country estate of her boss. “Marquees everywhere and Krug by the case! Not bad for a grammar school boy!”

 

The installation of the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition government in 2010 saw him snapped-up by a major financial institution in the City. His networks were impressive and his understanding of the UK economy even more so. What his new employers most admired about him was the ease with which he carried his many and varied talents. On neither shoulder were there any discernible chips. Gregarious, good-natured, and the proud possessor of one of the finest hip-hop collections in London, even the toffs liked him.

 

If he really was as good as everyone (including himself) thought he was, however, he should have spotted the enormous risk Cameron was taking when, in 2013, he promised an In/Out binding referendum on EU membership. His wife’s parents had friends who were members of UKIP, and they were worried. “David doesn’t really have a very good grasp of the provincial middle-class mind”, they vouchsafed to their son-in-law. “We don’t think he understands the degree to which he’s putting his future into the hands of the English working-class.”

 

He saw the irony, of course, but 2013 was back in the BC – Before Corbyn – era. “Labour is rock-solid for the EU,” he reassured his wife. “Cameron’s as safe as houses.”

 

Corbyn was the game-changer. None of our man’s friends in the party saw the old bugger coming. With his beard and his bicycle – and his penchant for defying the Whip – Corbyn was regarded as a rather poor 1980s joke. Like the Scottish National Party, he was not to be taken seriously.

 

Until he won.

 

Our man simply could not fathom how Corbyn, like the SNP, had been able to shake Labour to its very foundations. Neither of them grasped the impossibility of their dreams. The old fool and his followers didn’t seem to understand that the world had moved beyond the restorative policies of an ageing Trotskyist from Islington. Like Scotland, he just didn’t have the right sort of resources, or the right sort of friends.

 

Then along came Cameron’s bloody referendum. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to have the right sort of resources and the right sort of friends. Unaccountably, they no longer seemed to work.

 

His wife’s people reported that the shires were in open revolt. The dragon’s teeth that, year after year, UKIP had sown among the fields and hedgerows of “Little England” had grown into a veritable Game of Thrones collection of unstoppable fire-breathers. And who was that, sitting astride one of their scaly necks, looking for all the world like Daenerys, Mother of Dragons? Bloody Boris Johnson – that’s who!

 

Which meant that it was now up to Labour to save the day. Meaning it was up to Corbyn to save the day. Apparently, he knew how to talk to working people. He’d persuade them to get out and vote for “Remain”.

 

Our man’s wife was sceptical. “Corbyn’s a Londoner, darling, and I’m not sure a Londoner is the right sort of person to persuade your party’s ‘Friends in the North’. Indeed, I’m not sure that Labour any longer has anyone who can speak to the working-class of this country about the things that matter to them.”

 

Our man wasn’t convinced. Weren’t the polls shifting back towards ‘Remain’? Hadn’t the tragic assassination of Jo Cox reminded the working-class who their real friends were? When his bosses asked him which way the electorate was going to jump, he gave them his most winning smile, and told them not to worry. At the end of the day, the people would know what was good for them.

 

That advice cost his employers a great deal of money. There’d be no bonus this year to pay for the boys school fees. Never mind, there was always politics. Labour was in dire need of some sound advice. He reached for his cell-phone and scrolled through his contacts until he found the number.

 

The accent at the other end was pure Oxbridge: “Good Lord, old chap, how long has it been? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

 

“I’m calling about Corbyn. Need any help?”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 28 June 2016.

Hooked On A Feeling: There Was Nothing Rational About Brexit.

Britain's Bellwether: The big vote for "Leave" in Sunderland was the first sign that Britain was on the way out of the European Union. But why did Sunderland, a strongly regenerating industrial city, not grasp the rational arguments for EU membership? Because rationality had nothing to do with how people voted. As always in politics, it was about power and control. Who had it - and who didn't.

 

SUNDERLAND was Britain’s bellwether. When the news came through on (our) Friday morning that 61 percent of its citizens had voted to leave the European Union (EU) the Pound went into freefall. Suddenly, the political class’s smug confidence that Britain would remain in the EU was exposed as wishful thinking. If the prosperous, go-ahead city of Sunderland had decided not to stay, then, clearly, Britain was leaving.
 

Sunderland prosperous and go-ahead? Well, yes, apparently. Once famed for its shipbuilding, coal-mining and glass manufacturing, this classic north-east English industrial city (roughly the size of Christchurch) has certainly experienced some very hard times over the past forty years. Today, however, it ranks as one of Britain’s more successful “regenerating” communities. The automobile manufacturer, Nissan, set up shop in 1986, and Sunderland now boasts Britain’s largest car factory. More recently, the city’s burgeoning service sector lifted Sunderland into Britain’s top seven “intelligent” cities.
 

From this distance, the temptation is to imagine a stereotypical group of cloth-capped, blue-collared, left-behind “Mackem”, sitting in the pub and jeering whenever a “Remain” campaigner appeared the TV to warn them of the serious economic consequences should Britain vote to leave.
 

“Eee, by heck, lad, yer cam oop ‘ere and tell us abart ‘serious economic consequences’, and we’ll sha yer tee rotting docks and tee closed pits and send yer back tee London and all yer canny mates wi’ tee message that lee-if oop ‘ere could ‘ardly git any worse!”
 

In Maggie Thatcher’s Britain of the1980s, maybe. But not in the “Sunlun” of 2016.
 

On the basis of Sunderland’s recent economic performance, the response of its overwhelmingly working-class population to the EU Referendum was expected to reflect a cautious optimism. It is, after all, a city in which upwards of 60 percent of citizens own their own homes, and where large numbers of young people are taking full advantage of its expanding tertiary education sector. Sunderland is also an overwhelmingly white city, with fewer than 10 percent non-white residents.
 

Why then did it vote so decisively to leave the EU?
 

Exactly the same question is being asked by members of the political class from all over Britain – and the world. Wasn’t “Remain” the only rational choice? Even with all its flaws, weren’t the British people indisputably better off within the EU than without it? Obviously, voting to “Leave” was politically irrational. It made no sense. Why would anyone do it?
 

But leaving the EU was never about behaving rationally. Those asking their fellow Britons to vote for “Leave” were speaking directly to their hearts – not their heads. Overwhelmingly, the people who voted “Leave” in the referendum were guided by how they felt about themselves; their community; and their nation. And these feelings, like just about everything else in politics, were driven by issues of power and control.
 

Do you feel in control of your life? Do you feel in control of your community? Do you feel in control of your country? Do you feel in control of your future? Who has power over you? Who do you exercise power over?
 

To those whose employment is both precarious and/or oppressive, the sense of being in control of one’s life is weak. The sense of being at the mercy of others, on the other hand, is very strong.
 

The presence of EU immigrants in British communities, with all the attendant pressures on local housing, health, education and employment, not only fuelled anger and prejudice, but also stoked a deep sense of powerlessness. The EU’s rules had steadily eroded local communities’ power to decide who could, and could not, join their ranks. It was a power they were anxious to reclaim.
 

The growing realisation that the candidates chosen by both major parties were fundamentally out-of-sync with the values and aspirations of the people they purported to represent was alienating significant numbers of voters from the entire electoral process. Democracy means “power is exercised by the people”, but more and more of the British people were beginning to feel that they no longer exercised any power at all.
 

The flipside to these feelings of diminishing power and control were identifiable in that fraction of the British population who experienced their country’s membership of the EU as both liberating and empowering. Far from feeling oppressed in their working lives, these folk saw the EU as the bringer of ever more exciting opportunities. They welcomed the growing diversity of Britain’s communities and regarded migrants as exciting and valuable additions to the national mix. Nor were they alienated by the sort of people ending up in Parliament. In their eyes, at least, they were admirably representative.
 

Feeling thus ruled both sides. “Remainers” clearly believed a majority of Britons shared their positive feelings towards the EU. “Do they heck as like!”, responded the good folk of Sunderland.
 

This essay was originally posted on the Stuff website on Monday, 27 June 2016.