(A sort of sequel – well more of a
prequel – to this)
Most people in my social circles took
it as almost axiomatic that Leave couldn’t win. After all, everyone
that everyone knew was voting Remain. Our social media was thick with
it. Like the Bush election, common sense would surely reassert
itself. Can’t happen here. (Myself, I had imagined it would go to
Remain by a slender margin, once the don’t knows were forced off
the fence.)
And okay, it only went to Leave by a
slender margin. Seemingly trivial factors, such as if young people
had voted in greater numbers, might have nudged it the other way. It
virtually went down to a coin flip. But a miss is a good as a mile.
Leave did win. Talk of re-runs is not just fantasy but absurdity. So
– shortly after taking a stab at what might happen next - we need
to backtrack a bit and look at how we got here.
Remain campaigners have tended to reply
with “well Leave lied”. And yes, so they did. But Remain lied
too. What about Osborne’s projected Project Fear budget? The point
about Leave is that those were the lies people wanted to hear. People
could be even told “these are lies” and they’d reply “I don’t
care”. To say “you shouldn’t listen to these lies” proved
about as useless as telling an alcoholic they should stop drinking.
The question to ask is what made those lies resonate.
Let’s ask a more specific question.
In the (interminable) debates whenever Leave were asked a difficult
question (like, say, what’s the plan? Or, is any of this even
true?) they could just cry “but we’re British!” and everyone
would cheer. As almost anything counted as a difficult question for
them, this happened rather a lot. But it still worked every time.
It’s ludicrous, of course. Once Britain was the
strongest country in Europe. But it was over a century ago and one or
two things have happened since then. Why are people primed in that
way?
What’s widespread in Britain, and was
all over Leave supporters, isn’t just nationalism but feelbad
nationalism. We've all experienced feelbad, feelgood for masochists.
People wallow in it, just like it makes them feel good. Even though
it makes them feel bad. Feelbad is almost a national sport in
Britain. In fact it overlaps to a considerable degree with out
official national sport -football. The Mail and Express are like the
crack cocaine of feelbad. But feelbad seems almost the exclusive form
of British nationalism. When you hear someone, almost always from
another country, expressing feelgood nationalism it seems strange.
And this expressed itself, inevitably
enough, through stab-in-the-back theories. You heard it over and over
again. We should be the best country in the world
but we got robbed. The EU is just a scam to fleece us, and burden us
with other countries’ surplus populations. In Brussels they dream
up regulations just to taunt us. Rip up the rip-off contract and we
will be great again.
Very many people in Britain today are
not just very poor, but very poor in a very rich country. And that
has a special spin. You see wealth all the time,
you just don’t get to touch it. And that’s
something which has happened within the past few generations – jobs
for life, wages you could live on, social housing, dole money not
food banks… all those are still within folk memory at the same time
they’ve been determined as politically impossible.
And if you can’t have anything else
you can at least have an identity. People who live on the estates of
Brighton, such as Whitehawk, will often have a strong sense of local
identity. While for me where I live is just where I happen to be
living. They don’t, in the main, like living in
Whitehawk. As them what it’s like and they’ll quickly tell you
it’s a shithole. But it’s something that’s theirs.
And feelbad nationalism, particularly
with its stab-in-the-back narratives, fulfils a similar need in a
broader context. The value of it is that it feels like a projection
of your own situation. Despite all the ‘Benefits
Street’ poverty porn propaganda that infests the TV, most
working class people are actually working. That's
how middle class people get to lead middle class lives. Yes, they’re
reliant on benefits as well. But that’s because wages are so low
and work so insecure.
You pick up all the shifts you can, and
you can still barely keep your head above water. Clearly, you’re
being robbed. So it fits that your country would be too. “Take back
control” has a special resonance when you feel like you have no
real control over your own life, when you're on a zero hours contract
waiting and hoping for the next text offering the next shift.
It may be some Leave voters were even
setting themselves up for the next stab. They'll take our votes and
then renege on their promises? Of course they will! You think you
need to tell us that? It's what always happens!
And when it does it will be all the more confirmed, we will have
another stab-in-the-back narrative to add to the others. In one way,
when it happens it will be reassuring. We will feel more like
ourselves than we did before.
But that’s just to describe how the
kindling got so dry. You also need to look at who dropped the match.
It seems to me that the Eurosceptic
Tory right is fairly unique to Britain. There isn’t really an
equivalent among, say, the German Christian Democrats. In most
continental countries Euroscepticism is confined to fringe groups. Or
at least, groups which were fringe twenty years ago. (Anyone reading
this who knows of a counter-example please do comment and let me
know. I would genuinely like to hear of it!)
And that is mostly to do with the
remarkably rapid shift to neoliberalism in Britain. The EU is without
doubt a neoliberal institution, closely tied to the International
Monetary Fund, keen to promote austerity and privatisation wherever
it can. (Like I say, Leave lied a lot too.) But it is not keeping
Britain’s pace on the road to neoliberalism – indeed it can’t.
The British working class, after successive defeats, is unable to act
as much of a brake against it. While, for example, the French working
class is quite actively applying the brakes - quite hard and right
now. For Britain, European neoliberalism is yesterday’s
neoliberalism. And so pernicious, so deep-rooted is neoliberal
ideology that yesterday's neoliberalism is equated to old-school
“socialism”. “Too slow” means the same thing as “all
wrong”.
Then put those two groups together, and
do not return once lit. You can’t call it an accord because one
group is quite clearly being manipulated by the other. But there’s
a relation and it’s that which leads to Leave winning.
…all of which may sound specifically
British. So at least there's an upside – it can happen here, but
nowhere else, right? Unfortunately not. On the continent, it’s
partially the lack of Euroscepticism in mainstream parties which has
led to the growth of far-right fringe groups. (To a degree we haven't
seen here. UKIP, politically speaking, are effectively a pressure
group on the Tory party.) But, as said last time, such a growth is
now much more likely in Britain. This Out is, by and large, bogus.
But the next one might not be. While on the continent the reverse is
occurring - those far right parties are getting a lot less fringe
even as we speak. (There's also the irony that our first past the
post system, the bane of many, serves to keep the far right
marginalised at the same time as the more progressive groups.)
The choice we were given in this
referendum was essentially between globalised neoliberalism and
xenophobic isolationism. (Well, the apparent
choice. The real choice was between two types of globalised
neoliberalism, one of which was pretending not to be.) Neither option
is good for you or me. But the second was once merely a protest vote
against the first. Whereas it is now fast becoming a political force
in its own right.
In Greece, for example,everyone knows
the story of how Syriza won a popular vote but were prevented from
carrying out their programme. So what is stopping people now turning
to the second-fastest growing party after them – the blatantly
fascist Golden Dawn? Where to go when democracy has let you down?
Authoritarianism must be looking like a choice.
Marie Le Pen may be proved right.
Brexit may be a seismic moment for the European far right.
And if that doesn’t scare you it
should do.
I hate it all. Hate it hate it hate it.
ReplyDeleteWhat is even the point of rational discussion when we know that chanting catchy lies over and over again always wins?
And as for the people who voted for Gove, Farage and Johnson? It's hard for me to have any sympathy with them as they face the inevitable consequences of their pandering to the Express's and Mail's xenophobia. A pox on everyone's house.
I don't think the thing was the catchiness. "We're British!" isn't terribly catchy. I think the thing was people's circumstances primed them to respond to some lies against others.
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing for me is, it always feels like anti-EU sentiment is something my lot should be expressing! As I say in the piece, it's a neoliberal, austerity-imposing body which screwed over Greece against the express wishes of its people. And in the 1975 referendum, that was much more the case. What angers me more isn't so much that they lie - of course they lie - but they've slanted things so we don't get to speak at all.
Whenever I brought that up people would say "well of course the EU needs to be reformed". But I can't see those reforms being at all a realistic prospect. You might as well ask a shark to reform it's mouth into a hospital for small fish. In the end, while I didn't want Leave to win because that was letting UKIP and the Tory right win, I couldn't bring myself to vote for it, so I abstained.
But then again, if I was minded to argue against myself, the recent EU ruling against Apple dodging tax in Ireland isn't just welcome, it's the sort of thing that only a transnational body could achieve. Otherwise they could just carry on playing nation off against nation, like they normally do.