OFF TOPIC: The EU Referendum

Politics. I’m sorry, but if you wanted an illustration of the falsehood of the ‘it doesn’t affect me’ refrain, you can see it right here, in the UK’s referendum on EU membership. I’ve been thinking about the mess we’re now in, thinking about it a lot, and the only way I’m going to be able to get any work done is if I get those thoughts out of my head, so forgive me.

Firstly: racism and xenophobia. No one, at least no one sensible, is saying that everyone, or even most people, who voted to leave the EU are racists. But. But, some of them were racist and xenophobic. I know, I argued with them online and I heard them spewing their hatred in the streets and in the pub.

And to a very real degree, the tone of the ‘Leave’ campaign cynically played to those prejudices and, in doing so, legitimised them. The racists and the xenophobes are emboldened. They’re marching in Newcastle to demand the repatriation of immigrants, posting flyers saying ‘Go Home’ through the letterboxes of Poles in Sunderland. They’re shouting abuse at anyone they think ‘looks foreign’ on the high streets of towns up and down the country.

I understand racism. It’s a wired-in reflex that makes us wary, fearful of the Other because, for thousands of years, the Other was quite likely to kill you, steal your things, burn your home and your crops, or sell you and your family into slavery. In some parts of the world, those fears are still all too real.

But not here. Here, it’s OK to acknowledge that the shrill little voice exists somewhere in the back of your head, but it’s not OK to act on it. We’re human beings; it’s our job to do better. We may be jealous of our neighbour’s spanky new car, but we don’t pick up a rock, bash his head in, and take it. We don’t (by and large) restrain that instinct because it’s illegal, we restrain it because we know it’s wrong.

Same thing with racism.

People say you don’t solve a problem like racism by bottling up, but you do. You can’t stop a generation from feeling the way they feel, but you can stop them from poisoning the minds of the next generation. There’s a generation of kids growing up now who mostly don’t give a damn if people are straight, gay, or something else. They’ve seen positive depictions in the mainstream media, had these reinforced in education, and understand that the only thing that matters about a relationship is whether the people in it make each other happy.

Same thing with racism and xenophobia.

And I argued with these people online. “Don’t call me a xenophobe!” One protested. So I asked them a simple question:

“What’s the difference between someone moving to your town from Krakow or Bucharest to find a job, and someone moving there from Leeds or Aberdeen?”

If the answer is (as it was in this case): “It’s different because they’re not British” then that, right there, is xenophobia. That’s what the word means.

Now, I’ll accept that you could argue that they’re displacing a British person from a job, but the whole point of the free movement of labour is that British people are equally at liberty to move to Maastricht or Dresden or Toulouse to find work. I’ll also accept that movement in the opposite direction, into Europe, is hampered by the inability of most British people to speak a second language, any second language, with much competence.

But this, surely, is the product of a flaw in our national character, amplified by failings in our education system? To blame those crafty foreigners for having education systems that are better at teaching their children languages than ours? Isn’t that a strange argument?

Well, placing the blame in the wrong place is a recurring theme of this entire mess.

You might also argue that those immigrants, with their willingness to work for minimum wage, are depressing wages that might otherwise be higher in their absence.

You’d be wrong, because there’s no evidence to support such a claim. Even if you were right, however, surely the existence of jobs with wages so low that they’re unappealing to all but immigrants from poorer nations is a failure of government to set a minimum wage that doesn’t feel like a starvation rate, a failure of the workers to stand together and demand fairer remuneration for their labour (a failure engineered in large part by the government’s evisceration of the trade unions and organised labour)?

So, what we’re seeing here is anger and frustration. Understandable anger and frustration, but nonetheless misplaced.

But it’s anger we have to understand.

When the ‘Remain’ campaign said “if we leave, it’ll torpedo the Northern Ireland peace process”, or “Scotland will press for independence”, or “the pound will crash”, or “we’ll destroy the City of London”, the ‘Leave’ campaign glibly responded “You’re wrong” and it turns out ‘Remain’ weren’t wrong.

But have that same argument, present that same case to ‘Leave’ voters on the ground, as I did, and you got a very different answer to every one of those points:

“I don’t care.”

Every single time. “I don’t care.”

And that’s what so many of us who wanted to remain are failing to grasp.

Whenever there’s a riot somewhere, we sit in our nice, middle-class homes and tut-tut and remark “Well, what’s the point of that? It’s their own neighbourhood; their own shops they’re smashing up, their own cars they’re burning…”

And we just don’t understand that this is an expression of anger and frustration that simply has no other outlet.

And, in this context, it’s anger and frustration born of thirty-odd years of neoliberal market forces economics.

A succession of governments, Conservative and New Labour, who were prepared to let all the old jobs wither away and do precious little to equip those left behind for the brave new world. Who were prepared to see the jobs that disappeared replaced with newer ones that were less skilled and lower paid, that had insecurity built into their contracts.

And in this environment, people all but bankrupted themselves to buy a house; bankrupted themselves again to send their kids to university in the hope that they’d do better; bankrupted themselves a third time when they had to support those same kids through the unpaid internships and low-paid insecure work the university education was supposed to insulate them from; bankrupted themselves a fourth time to help their children get their own homes.

Or maybe they weren’t fortunate enough to have enough access to capital to even consider bankrupting themselves. Instead, they found themselves at the mercy of private landlords charging exorbitant rents for substandard properties, because successive governments have refused to regulate the rental sector properly whilst allowing the stock of social housing to dwindle almost out of existence. And then, when the pittance of their wages in the New Economy failed to cover their rent, they were treated like spongers and parasites for claiming Housing Benefit to meet the shortfall.

And all this anger and frustration, not least because at every election the main party and the party of opposition are offering the most fractionally different flavours of the same neoliberal ice cream, finally found an outlet. And, like burning their own cars and smashing their own shops, they voted for an outcome that would make things materially worse for them because they just didn’t care. At this point, it was more important to smash things up and hope that somehow, finally, some damn thing would change.

And this is the point the Remain campaign so sadly failed to address, because it meant addressing their own collective failings. To direct the anger away from the immigrants, the Other, they would have to admit that it’s not the immigrants that mean you can’t get a house, it’s thirty years of government abdication of responsibility for housing policy; it’s not the immigrants keeping your child out of your preferred school, it’s the lack of teachers in a demoralised, underfunded, marketised education system. It’s not the immigrants clogging up A&E, it’s the year-on-year underfunding of an NHS already buckling under the costs of despicably inequitable PFI contracts.

And none of these things has the slightest thing to do with the EU.

And what makes me fearful for the future is the idea that the Labour Party is about to step back sharply towards the neoliberal centre-right. Two largely indistinguishable parties at the middle of the political system empowers the far right to go after the disillusioned, the disenfranchised.

The challenge is not to “acknowledge people’s legitimate concerns about immigration”, the challenge is to acknowledge people’s legitimate concerns and place the blame for those concerns where it belongs. And then to tell people what you plan to do about it.

At this point, it’s abundantly clear that ‘more of the same’ is not a good enough answer.