Brexit: the disaster decades in the making

On the day after the EU referendum, many Britons woke up feeling that the country
had changed overnight. But the forces that brought us here have been gathering for
a very long time by Gary Young, Thursday 30 June 2016
One week ago, against the advice of its political establishment, Britain narrowly voted to leave the
European Union. Within a few days, that establishment was in the process of a full-scale
implosion: the country is effectively without government or opposition, shorn of leadership, bereft of
direction. As the pound crashed and markets tanked, the chancellor of the exchequer went missing
for three days while Boris Johnson, the most prominent member of the Leave campaign, spent the
weekend not sketching out a plan for the nation’s future, but playing cricket and writing his column
for the Telegraph. Having asserted its right to sovereignty, the country can now find nobody to
actually run it.

Meanwhile, the very prize won in the referendum – to leave the EU – remains unclaimed. Article 50
of the Lisbon Treaty sets out the process for leaving the EU. Once invoked, a country has two
years to negotiate the terms of the divorce. But no one will touch it. Prime Minister David Cameron,
who led the losing campaign to remain in the EU, announced his resignation within hours of the
result, insisting that his successor should be the one to pull the trigger. Johnson, who is favoured
to replace Cameron, protests that there is “no need for haste”. During the campaign, our departure
from the EU had many proud and pushy parents. In victory it is an orphan.

Cutting the figure not so much of a failed state as a state intent on failure, the nation’s credit rating
was downgraded, its currency devalued and its stock market depleted. On polling day the Leave
campaign reminded us that we were the fifth-largest economy in the world and could look after
ourselves. By the following afternoon our currency was sufficiently decimated that we had fallen to
sixth, behind France.

In the ensuing panic, some politicians argued that we could simply ignore the referendum result:
David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, suggested it was “advisory and non-binding”, and
urged parliament to call another referendum, in order to avert economic catastrophe. A huge
number of people petitioned the government to do the same – while the eminent barrister Geoffrey
Robertson insisted a second referendum was not necessary to overturn the result: parliament
could just vote it down. “Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by
referendum,” he wrote. “Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less
the tyranny of the mob.”

It was argued that we could not leave the final word on such momentous decisions to ordinary
voters: they didn’t know what they really wanted, or they had been tricked into wanting something
that would hurt them, or they were too ignorant to make informed choices, or maybe they quite
simply wanted the wrong thing. A significant portion of the country was in the mood for one big do-
over – a mood enhanced by considerable class contempt and the unmistakable urge to cancel the
universal franchise for “stupid people” incapable of making the right decisions.

Everything had changed – we had decided to end a more than 40-year relationship with our
continental partners and the consequences were far-reaching. In Scotland independence was
once again in play; in Westminster, resignations from the shadow cabinet came by the hour; in the
City, billions were wiped off by the day. Indeed, one of the few things that didn’t budge was the
very issue that had prompted it all: our membership of the European Union. The only thing we
know for sure is that we don’t know how and when we will actually leave it. We are simultaneously
in freefall and at a standstill, in a moment of intense and collective disorientation. We don’t know
what is happening and it is happening very fast.

But the only thing worse than the result and its consequences is the poisonous atmosphere that
made it possible. The standard of our political discourse has fallen more precipitously than the
pound and cannot be revived as easily. This did not happen overnight, and the sorry conduct of the
referendum campaign was only the latest indication of the decrepit state of our politics: dominated
by shameless appeals to fear, as though hope were a currency barely worth trading in, the British
public had no such thing as a better nature, and a brighter future held no appeal. Xenophobia – no
longer closeted, parsed or packaged, but naked, bold and brazen – was given free rein. A week
before the referendum, an MP was murdered in the street. When the man accused of killing her
was asked his name in court he said: “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

On the day after the referendum, many Britons woke up with the feeling – some for better, some
for worse – that they were suddenly living in a different country. But it is not a different country:
what brought us here has been brewing for a very long time.

The thing people often forget about Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf is that in the end,
there really was a wolf. Indeed, the story wouldn’t have its moral if the wolf didn’t show up and
ravage the shepherd boy’s flock. Lying has consequences that last far longer than individual acts
of deception: it ruins the liar’s ability to convince people when it really matters.

The source of the mistrust between the establishment and the country isn’t difficult to fathom. Next
week the Chilcot inquiry will publish its findings into the Iraq war. After Iraq, we faced an economic
crisis that few experts saw coming until it was too late. Then followed austerity; now the experts
said this was precisely the wrong response to the crisis, but it happened anyway.

When leaders choose the facts that suit them, ignore the facts that don’t and, in the absence of
suitable facts, simply make things up, people don’t stop believing in facts – they stop believing in
leaders. They do so not because they are over-emotional, under-educated, bigoted or hard-
headed, but because trust has been eroded to such a point that the message has been so tainted
by the messenger as to render it worthless.

This was the wolf we were warned about. It is now mauling our political culture and savaging our
economic wellbeing. We were warned of it by leaders in whom we had no confidence. So we all
chose the facts we liked, and we all suffered. The wolf does not discriminate. As Aesop reminds us
at the end of the fable: “Nobody believes a liar, even when he’s telling the truth.”

This distrust is both mutual and longstanding, prompting two clear trends in British electoral
politics. The first is a slump in turnout. In 1950, 84% of Britons voted in the general election; by last
year it was 66%. The decline has not been uniform, but the general trajectory has been consistent.
Between 1945 and 1997 turnout never went below 70%; since 2001 it has never reached 70%.
The second is a fracturing in political allegiance. For most of the postwar period, British electoral
politics was effectively a duopoly. In 1951, 97% of votes were cast either for Conservatives or
Labour. By last year, the combined total was 67%. Fewer people want to vote, and fewer voters
want the two major parties. With a first-past-the-post system, designed to ensure that one of those
parties wins a majority, our governments now preside with diminished legitimacy over a splintered
political landscape. Cameron’s Tories were elected last year with only 24% of the eligible vote. In
1950, Winston Churchill was defeated even though 38% of eligible voters backed him.

These trends had similar consequences for the tactics of the two major parties. Under Cameron,
the Conservatives, who had lost two prime ministers to the question of Europe, were able to
abandon the most nativist elements of their base in order to pursue votes in the centre, rebranding
themselves as the sensible party of British modernity. No longer “the nasty party”, the
Conservative leadership embraced gay marriage, aggressively sought non-white spokespeople,
and took a more moderate line on Europe than its members felt comfortable with.

Labour could also reposition itself, in the knowledge that it could keep winning elections even as it
kept losing voters. Those who voted for Brexit tended to be English, white, poor, less educated and
old. With the exception of the elderly, these have traditionally been Labour’s base. But the party
has been out of touch with them for some time. The New Labour project made the party’s appeal
both broader and shallower: there was a sharp pivot rightward, made with the conscious
calculation that its core supporters had nowhere else to go.

The coalition of metropolitan liberals, city-dwellers, ethnic minorities, union members, working-
class northerners and most of Scotland slowly began to fray. Poverty went down and inequality
went up. Appeals to class politics gave way to more aspirational messaging. While covering the
2001 election, I recall the indifference that met Tony Blair on the campaign trail. He would appear
in front of small, curious crowds, and then wave over their heads into the middle distance for the
cameras. They voted for him – the alternative was William Hague running around in front of a
pound sign – but they were not remotely engaged or inspired by him or his party.

In areas that Labour once had a stranglehold on, its vote slumped. Blair took his third victory in
2005 with only 9.5 million votes – fewer than Neil Kinnock managed when he lost to Margaret
Thatcher in 1987. As long as the economy was doing well, a significant proportion of voters just
stayed home – and there was no way to tell how soft the remaining support was until it was tested.
Now those tests have come: in Scotland from the SNP, and in England and Wales from Ukip.

It may seem a minor matter in the wake of this referendum to say that our political parties are
failing in their historic mission, but we would not have arrived here were they not doing so. The
party set up by trade unions to represent the interests of workers in parliament no longer
commands the allegiance of those people. True, almost two-thirds of Labour voters did vote
remain – but an overwhelming number of the working-class, the poor, and the left-behind put their
faith in leave. Meanwhile, the party of capital and nation has presided over a painful blow to the
City and the Union. Neither party is fit for purpose.

The leave campaign did not invent racism. The deployment of bigotry to suit electoral ends has
a longstanding tradition in this country, which is often denounced even by those who have done
exactly that. Neglect, both benign and malign, and indulgence, both covert and overt, left those
prejudices open for opportunists to exploit for their own ends. This was one such opportunity.
Liberal commentators have come to automatically identify poorer Britons with an ingrained loathing
of foreigners, but in fact the British working class has a distinguished history of anti-racism: from
the Lancashire mill workers boycotting cotton picked by slaves in the American Confederacy by to
the battle against fascism at Cable Street, and the campaigns of the Anti-Nazi League and
the Anti-Apartheid Movement. In the last year, thousands of ordinary people have made their way
to Calais with supplies for refugees.

Like all classes in Britain, however, it also has a bleak history of racism, which can make the
journey from the street to the ballot box. Sometimes this has taken the form of open calls for white
racial solidarity against non-whites. Sometimes it has taken organised forms, in the shape of
Oswald Mosley’s New Party, the National Front, or the British National Party. And at other times, it
has been neatly folded into the fabric of mainstream politics.

The National Front rose to prominence in the 1970s, but saw its advance blunted by Margaret
Thatcher, who promised to be tough on immigration, and expressed sympathy for people who “are
really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture”.
Then came the BNP, which triggered a brief period of intense scrutiny and concern when it won a
council seat in the Isle of Dogs, east London, in 1993. By 2003, the party had 17 councillors, and
by 2008, more than 50 around the country. By increments, the BNP became a constant, if
contested, fact of British municipal life. In the 2009 European elections, the party’s leader, Nick
Griffin, won one of two BNP seats in the European parliament. That same year, Griffin found
himself on BBC1’s Question Time. The rise of Ukip would later suck up all the oxygen on the far
right, and Griffin would disappear, only to be replaced by Nigel Farage. More blokey and garrulous,
less abrasive and boorish, Farage narrowed the focus to Europe and, by doing so, widened the far
right’s appeal.

The divisions such movements sow have always posed a particular challenge for Labour, since the
party’s core base of support is vulnerable to social and economic change to start with. That is why
nativist parties always play best during times of recession, when resources are scarce and people
are looking for someone to blame. In a letter from 1870 that, with a few words changed, could have
been written any time in the past few years, Karl Marx vividly described this dynamic: “Every
industrial and commercial centre in England possesses a working class divided into two hostile
camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish
worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life … This antagonism is artificially kept alive
and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short by all the means at the disposal
of the ruling classes.”

The Tories have consciously fanned these flames. In 2005, when the Tory leader Michael Howard
ran his whole general election campaign on immigration, with the insidious slogan “Are you
thinking what we’re thinking?”, the party’s MP in Castle Point, on the Essex coast, asked in one
leaflet: “What bit of ‘send them back’ don’t you understand Mr Blair?” During that election, I drove
from the least diverse constituency in the country – St Ives in Cornwall – to the most, which was in
east London. In Cornwall, the Liberal Democrat MP, Andrew George, said the racism he was
hearing was a particular worry. “It’s the one resonance issue that’s favouring the Tories,” he told
me. “On the doorstep people aren’t saying: ‘I’m voting Conservative because of their tax spending
plans.’ People have been saying, ‘We only came down here to get away from the blacks,’ and
there was no self-consciousness about saying it out loud. I’m very disturbed about it. Maybe
they’re not playing the race card. But they’re playing the immigration card and that’s right next to
the race card in the deck.”
This week, David Cameron condemned “despicable” xenophobic attacks in the wake of the EU
referendum. But just last month he was galvanising the Tory faithful in London with claims that the
Labour mayoral candidate, Sadiq Khan, was in cahoots with an imam who, Cameron alleged,
supported Isis. That claim was so utterly false that if the prime minister did not enjoy parliamentary
privilege against charges of defamation, he would have had to pay damages to the imam, as the
defence secretary Michael Fallon was forced to do when he repeated the remarks outside the
House of Commons.

With a few notable exceptions, Labour’s response has been less crass but no less calculated.
Labour tends to condemn outright bigotry before clothing it in the cosy blanket of understanding
and concern for the bigot. It protests and then it panders. It routinely points out that racism is bad,
but is rarely brave enough to make the case for why anti-racism is good. This leads to the worst of
all worlds. Racism and xenophobia are condemned but never challenged, which leaves those who
hold such views feeling silenced and ignored, but never engaged. This, in turn, leaves them prey to
hucksters like Farage, who can claim to speak for them.

After his party lost a seat in Smethwick, West Midlands, in 1964 to a notoriously racist campaign,
the Labour minister Richard Crossman concluded that: “It has been quite clear that immigration
can be the greatest potential vote-loser for the Labour party.” This view was shared by Tony Blair’s
government. Blair chose the white cliffs of Dover for a 2005 election speech on refugees and
immigration – when it was time for the photo call, there wasn’t a black face to be seen. In 2006, as
the Iraq war descended into chaos, home secretary John Reid turned his focus on the enemy
within – intolerant Muslims. “This is Britain,” Reid told the party conference. “We will go where we
please, we will discuss what we like, and we will never be browbeaten by bullies. That’s what it
means to be British.” A few years later Jack Straw lectured Muslim women on what to wear when
they came to his surgery.

The effect was not to blunt the rise of organised racism but to embolden it, making certain views
acceptable and respectable. It was embedded in our political language and institutions and then
left to fester.

We have yet to see a general election in which race and immigration are the defining issues. If
that were the case, one would expect to see Ukip do far better that it has previously. At an election,
people vote for parties that they believe, on balance, identify with their concerns on a range of
issues. But this was not a general election. It was a referendum on membership in an unloved
institution that was the source of mass migration on a scale that the government had not
anticipated, and that most Britons were not prepared for.

Although much has been made, since the referendum, of results showing that areas with little
migration were most opposed to it, we should not underestimate the jolt that accompanied the
effects of free movement within a newly enlarged European Union. I left Britain for America in
2003, before it opened its borders to the east. After a few trips back in 2005, I simply stopped
assuming that white people in London spoke English any more. The transformative potential was
clear even then: states may import workers, but it is people who actually come. My parents came
from Barbados in the 1960s, planning to stay for a few years, make some money and head back
“home”. Instead they had kids and stayed. I saw no reason why many of these new immigrants
wouldn’t do the same – and I wondered how the language we used to talk about race and
migration would change now that there were so many new arrivals who were white but not British.
In the past, pollsters and politicians had elided the two issues – considering “race/immigration” as
a single area of concern. That was never true or accurate, but the new situation made it even more
clear that we needed to have a sophisticated conversation about migration and race. Not the
conversation that politicians always claim we are avoiding, about the dreadful impact of migration –
but a conversation about our needs as an ageing nation, about our economic and foreign policies,
about how immigrants contribute far more in taxes than they take in benefits, and about the fact
that there are considerably fewer of them than British people think. (For instance, in a recent Ipsos
Mori poll, on average, respondents thought that EU immigrants accounted for 15% of the
population – the true figure is about 5%.) But that is not all: we needed to have a conversation
about the resources that communities require to accommodate an influx of new arrivals – school
places, hospital beds, housing – and about who was responsible for cutting the budgets that used
to provide these things.

But that is not the conversation we are having. It is not even the conversation we have never had.
It is the conversation our leaders have desperately and wilfully avoided. For decades, the issue of
race (the colour of people) and immigration (the movement of people) have been neatly
interwoven, as though they are one and the same thing – as though “British” people are not also
black and black people are not British.

It has been profitable for politicians – and not only Nigel Farage – to sow confusion about the
difference between migration from the EU and elsewhere, or the distinction between economic
migrants and asylum seekers. The argument that this was a vote about “economic” issues – since
the hated European migrants were not brown or black – is belied by the deliberate commingling of
every type of foreigner. It was not an accident that the “Breaking Point” poster, revealed by Farage
on the morning of Jo Cox’s murder, showed Syrian refugees coming into Slovakia, an image with
almost no relevance to the issue on the ballot. Xenophobia and racism are easily blended, and
they become an especially potent toxin among a population that no longer trusts its own leaders.
To describe this as a working-class revolt against the elites is to give the elites more credit than
they are due. With both sides run by Old Etonians and former Bullingdon boys, the elites were
going to win no matter who you voted for.

It would be more accurate to say that the results reflected an ambivalence toward the elites on
both sides. When leaders who you believe don’t care about you – and can do nothing for you – tell
you what is in your best interest, it’s reasonable to ignore them. People who were told they would
lose out in the recession to come felt they didn’t have much to lose; people who were told that
belonging to the EU gave them certain rights and advantages did not see they had any value. It
would be as much of a mistake to assume these people consciously voted for Faragism as to think
they could never be tempted by it.

On this point, those who voted remain should, at the very least, concede that had we voted to stay
in, the country would not be having this conversation. If remain had won, we would already have
returned to pretending that everything was carrying on just fine. Those people who have been
forgotten would have stayed forgotten; those communities that have been abandoned would have
stayed invisible to all but those who live in them. To insist that they will now suffer most ignores the
fact that unless something had changed, they were going to suffer anyway. Those on the remain
side who felt they didn’t recognise their own country when they woke up on Friday morning must
spare a thought for the pensioner in Redcar or Wolverhampton who has been waking up every
morning for the last 30 years, watching factories close and businesses move while the council cuts
back services and foreigners arrive, wondering where their world has gone to.

Many of those who voted leave will undoubtedly feel that they have had their say after years of
being ignored. But they are beginning to discover that they have been lied to. Even when it feels
that there is nothing left to lose, it turns out that things can always get worse. And even when it
feels like nobody tells you the truth, it turns out that some factions of the elite can and will do more
damage to your life than others.

One of the defining illusions of the populist rightwing agenda is that it possesses a unique ability to
rally the poor on the basis of race and nation – but even here, it cannot deliver on its own terms.
The leaders of the leave campaign have been in a furious retreat since their moment of triumph:
they have walked back promises to control immigration, to quit the single market, and to “give our
NHS the £350m the EU takes every week”. Leaving the EU does not diminish the power of the
multinationals that moved manufacturing jobs overseas, or the financiers whose recklessness led
to the closure of libraries and the shrinking of disability benefits. We have not opted out of global
capitalism. Something will now be done about the free movement of labour – but capital will still
have the run of the place.

The anger that has been unleashed is not being directed at the elites. Instead it is flying every
which way to alarming effect: black people are being abused in the street; a Polish community
centre has been defaced; eastern European children are being taunted in schools. Liberals are
blaming the poor, Cameron is blaming Boris, the Daily Express is blaming the EU (“Brexit Vote is
EU’s Fault: Ignoring Britain was Big Mistake”), business is blaming Cameron and Boris, Scotland is
blaming England, London is blaming the rest of England, children are blaming their parents, and
the EU is blaming all of us.

On 31 December 1999, as American television viewers watched around-the-clock coverage of the

arriving millennium, one time zone at a time, the ABC newsreader Peter Jennings offered an
appraisal of recent British history as he watched the fireworks light up the sky over the Thames.
“This country has been through so much,” he said. “In 1900, when Queen Victoria was on the
throne, Britain ruled over one-fifth of the world’s population. But for all this fantastic show, Britain’s
possessions have dwindled to … Well, Hong Kong has gone now and, well … The Falklands are
still British.”

Ever since the Suez crisis, Britain has struggled with its place in the modern world. Nostalgic about
its former glory, anxious about its diminished state, forgetful about its former crimes, bumptious
about its future role, it has lived on its reputation as an elderly aristocrat might live on his trust fund
– frugally and pompously, with a great sense of entitlement and precious little self-awareness.
Once great, now not so great, it has struggled to find a status in its post-colonial iteration that fits
its size and budget. We punch above our weight culturally, have significant clout economically and
suffer painful delusions of grandeur militarily (let’s not talk about football). Where foreign policy and
defence are concerned, Britain’s desire to be taken very seriously is the chief obstacle to it being
taken more seriously. One of the central reasons for keeping the Trident weapons system, we are
told, is so that we can keep “a seat at the table”. Our military involvement in Syria was intended not
to be decisive but to send a message. And then there was Iraq. In most cases Britain craved a role
for itself as the sole reliable conduit between America and Europe. Peripheral to the action; central
to the process.

The fact that our ability to fulfil that function for the US has been severely diminished – President
Barack Obama asked us to remain and we wouldn’t even listen to him – may be one of the few
good things to come out of this whole mess. Indeed, our lesser status has already become clear
from the attempts that have been made to negotiate ourselves out of the situation we just voted
ourselves into.

While we were in the EU, Europe was prepared to try and make it work, even though we were a
severe irritant. Now that we’ve voted out, they just want us gone. The German chancellor, Angela
Merkel, could not have been clearer. She’s not interested in Britain holding another referendum,
and is not inclined to give it any special favours. There would be no “cherry-picking. There must be
and there will be a palpable difference between those countries who want to be members of the
European family and those who don’t.” In other words, we will now be treated like any other
country – which is precisely what we assumed we weren’t.

This melancholic grasping for our former glory has not served our politics well and is a key to
understanding how this happened. In the absence of any substantive argument about how “taking
back control” might look in the 21st century, we got men like Farage and Johnson waving flags and
pounding their chests.

The route map out of this sorry situation will not be achieved by reversing the results of an election
(even if that were desirable) or renegotiating a deal with the EU (even if that were possible). It will
come through some broader reimagining of Britain that pays more attention to work, fairness,
community and equality, than to flag, nation, anthem and culture. For the last 15 years,
governments and the press have stoked fears about whether British culture could withstand the
integration of Muslims – of whom 70% voted for remain – when they should have been worried
about how to integrate the white working class into the British economy.

Brexit didn’t create these problems. It exposed them and will certainly make them worse. The
decision as to whether we live in or out of the EU has been made. The choice before us now is
whether we are finally ready to confront the issues that we have blissfully denied and engage with
the communities we have carelessly ignored.