YV

We are politically and morally bankrupt if we set our sights against those people who decided to try to punish the establishment by voting for Trump and voting for Brexit and voting for Le Pen.

Our obligation is to talk to them, to find out what keeps them up at night, and to have a discussion with them, which results in a reconfiguration of their own thinking.

Let me give you an example. I was in Doncaster, a northern English city, during the Brexit campaign, and there was this lovely old lady who approached me and said, “Look, I like you very much, and I like what you’ve done in the eurozone and so forth, but I can’t take your recommendation that I should vote against Brexit. Let me tell you why,” she said. “I’m not racist. Next door to me there are these four Romanian boys. They’re lovely boys. They share a flat. They pay the rent. They do all sorts of jobs. They struggle. They’re lovely, and they save as much money as they can to send back to their home to keep their parents alive in Romania.

“But do you realize,” she said, “that by working together like this and living together, they can afford to outbid Doncaster local families that cannot afford the same amount of rent as they can, since they are poor boys working?”

I said to her, “Let me ask you this. This building of yours, is it publicly owned or is this privately owned?” She said, “Well, it used to be a council estate, a publicly owned housing estate, and then it was privatized, and now we have a private landlord.”

I said, “So you see where the problem is? The problem is not the Romanian boys. The problem is that your public housing was privatized, and then the privateer decided to utilize this new property right in order to maximize his rents. The problem is not the Romanian boys; the problem is the destruction of the council housing program by the Tories. Do you really want to vote for Brexit, and therefore enable the Tory government to destroy whatever labor right protection there is from the European Union?”

That is the way to do it. Not treat her as a racist bigot, but engage in what really keeps these people up at night. If we can’t do it, we are huge failures.