The Brexit vote was an insurrectionary protest against neoliberalism, globalism and cultural contempt. It will break up the UK, and split England forever.

Sonja Sidoroff

The woman selling me the railway ticket at a small Welsh station was in no hurry. She was having a public discussion with the worker next to her. He said: ‘You can’t buy girls pink toys anymore, they have to be grey.’ She replied: ‘It’s the same with the word gollywog...’ They were both within earshot of customers and both wearing the uniform of a major rail company.

During the Brexit campaign you could hear it everywhere, if you bothered to listen. Brief random expressions of racism, brief revolts against political correctness. Coming from a small working-class town myself I knew what they meant: a fake revolt of the underclass was under way — against the values of a socially liberal elite and its lifelong project: membership of the European Union.

In that conversation, and millions like it, nobody had to use the word ‘Europe’. The referendum was just the opportunity to say: we’ve had enough. Enough bleakness, enough ruined high streets, enough minimum-wage jobs, and enough lies and fear-mongering from the political class. On the night, 56% of voters in that solidly Labour Welsh town voted to leave the EU.

The signs were there. In the local elections of May 2016 the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) broke through into the former mining valleys of Wales where politics had been solidly Labour since the party was formed in 1906. In the European Parliament elections of 2014 UKIP had won 26% of the vote across the UK, always concentrated in the same kind of town: small, drab, with a low-wage private sector and just enough inward migration to remind everyone of what economists confirmed: that migration from eastern Europe was suppressing the wages of the lowest paid.

How this long-present xenophobic mood burst through into Labour’s depressed heartlands and combined with the traditional nationalism of the Conservatives and suburbs and rural areas is the story of Brexit. You can see it on any of the voting maps. Urban England and all of Scotland voted to Remain. The poor small towns and cities of England and Wales voted to leave. Not even the presence of two universities, a large Asian minority and thriving urban economy was able to swing cities like Nottingham or Birmingham into the Remain camp. They voted to leave Europe, and in doing so turned a revolt that’s been brewing for years into a decisive historic event. There are three main reasons.

Credit as stopgap

First, neoliberalism is broken. Britain was the laboratory rat of neoliberalism. In the early 1980s Margaret Thatcher used pro-cyclical policies to turn a recession into an industrial and social collapse. The aim was to suppress labour’s cohesion and social power. The effect was — for decades to come — to suppress its wage bargaining power. During the 1990s and 2000s — as was the case across the developed world — the gap between stagnating incomes and economic growth was bridged by credit.

The illusion under Tony Blair was that wealth would in some way ‘trickle down’ from the affluent, asset-rich, globalised urban centres. When it did not, his chancellor, Gordon Brown, used public spending to massively expand in-work benefits and public sector employment. And as public services — such as refuse collection — were privatised wholesale, the illusion was complete. You could look at a Welsh valley town on the eve of the 2008 crash and see an economy bereft of productive private sector jobs, plagued by crime and diseases of poverty, but with an apparently thriving private service sector paid for by taxation. And the whole place surviving only because of in-work benefits and government-funded childcare, mental health and policing.

Then came the crash, a Tory-led government and austerity. Austerity slashed the in-work benefits public sector pay; the credit crunch destroyed the high street, leaving the unique, small shops people had grown up with either empty or replaced by the three ubiquitous symbols of the poor town: Poundland (where everything costs only £1), Cash Converters (where you can pawn your scrappy possessions for a loan) and the Citizens Advice Bureaux, where you can queue in the morning for free advice on how to restructure your debts, or avoid eviction, or combat thoughts of suicide.

It’s not like this everywhere. London, Manchester, Bristol and Leeds became, on the face of it, thriving, globally oriented cities. But even in the big cities, at the base layer was an economy where the low-paid woman who works at Zara buys lunch at Subway, and the low-paid man at Subway buys a shirt from Zara. And for both of them, the problem was not pay but housing. Fuelled by £375bn of quantitative easing, house prices and rents soared so high that many young people with jobs in London sleep two to a room. The old ‘student house’ arrangement: with one person in every room including the living spaces, has become the ‘lawyer’s house’.

So while neoliberalism’s crisis shattered the prospects of a younger generation, and forced them deep into debt, there is no direct link from that to the result. Primarily the revolt against the EU happened in the places where neoliberalism’s palliatives — the dense, glittering urban life of the multicultural city — did not exist, or were not enough to counteract the strong feeling of relentless economic doom.

Free movement lacked consent

In 2004, when eight countries from eastern Europe joined the free movement system of the EU, Tony Blair’s government — uniquely among the large EU countries — placed no temporary restrictions. A Home Office report confidently predicted that only 13,000 migrants would come (1). At time of writing there are three million EU-born people living in Britain, two million of them in the workforce. Combined with a steady inward migration from outside the EU, it has taken foreign-born workers close to nearly 17% of the workforce.

While many do public service jobs — with 55,000 EU-born workers in the NHS — they are mainly concentrated in the lowest paid private sector jobs. Forty-three per cent of the workforce in basic plants like canning, bottling and packing are migrants. Up the value chain, in the manufacturing sector, it is 33%. In south London I found a manufacturer of small lip balm tins whose entire workforce was recruited from Lithuania.

The social impact of high migration was understood — theoretically — by the political class, but never viscerally. The myth that UK-born workers were ‘too stupid’ to do these jobs, or ‘not willing to work’ suited the neoliberal narrative. Any suggestion that it was to do with the abysmally low wages, the constant fines and extra charges levied to push real wages below the legal minimum did not fit the narrative. The persistent abuse of hiring entire workforces from eastern Europe, without trying to recruit locally, was ignored.

The sudden arrival of Polish shops and Portuguese cafes in small-town Britain was assumed, by the metropolitan elite, to be just another sprinkling of globalisation’s magic dust into the drab lives of those that lived there. What I saw as a journalist reporting it, though, was acute resentment.

Finally, austerity added to the toxic mix. If half the mothers in your local doctor’s surgery speak Portuguese, then common sense suggests you employ a Portuguese-speaking nurse. When job cuts are decimating public services, the natural thought occurs: would the stress be less if there were fewer migrants? Those who dared to ask it were deemed xenophobes. So little did the political class understand the danger that the Conservative government cut a public fund specifically designed to match the arrival of new migrants with new money for local services.

Sonja Sidoroff

Cameron pledged to cut net immigration to ‘tens of thousands’. Last year net migration reached 333,000. Half of the net arrivals came from the EU and the rest through the points-based admission system linked to employer needs (2).

For the Brexit movement this figure became iconic. It held out the prospect that EU migration could add one million people to the population every three years; that wage growth at the low end of the workforce was impossible; and that not even a Conservative government had the will to act.

When Cameron was asked if the government could place micro-level discouragements on EU migration, the answer was no. He did not even bother to ask, formally, for significant changes to the free movement rules in his February 2016 negotiation.

Thus the scene was set for migration to become the framing issue around which all other issues of economic dislocation and poverty were arranged.

The tabloid newspapers pumped out vicious, barely-disguised racist propaganda, day after day. In the cities, where the young get their news from Buzzfeed and the old from heavily regulated public broadcasters, few realised how toxic the revolt against migration had become.

Remain ‘jumped the shark’

Third, the battle of narratives was lost. When the referendum campaign began, Cameron was forced to allow his party to divide, with no official line on Brexit. Instead he would use the machinery of government to fuel the campaign with statistics, reports and momentum.

Labour, meanwhile, had an official policy of backing Remain, but a leadership of lifelong leftwing eurosceptics. They swallowed their principles and campaigned to remain in the EU, but refused to join the cross-party Better In campaign — preferring to run their own ‘remain and reform’ operation.

Meanwhile an alternative Leave campaign was run by the ultra-right eurosceptics of UKIP and the Tory right, focusing relentlessly on migration. The result was, for a time, momentum for the Remain camp. Hundreds of business leaders, scientists and public intellectuals pledged support for the EU and issued authoritative warnings about economic chaos in the event of Brexit.

But suddenly, three weeks before the vote, the Remain campaign — dubbed ‘Project Fear’ by its opponents — ran out of steam. Once George Osborne had promised to crash the economy with a kamikaze austerity budget if Brexit triumphed, and once Obama had come and gone, and once Donald Tusk had warned of the collapse of western civilisation — there was nothing left to warn about. All the ammunition of fear had been expended. Remain had — as they say in Hollywood — ‘jumped the shark’.

As Labour activists hit the doorsteps in the last three weeks of the campaign they came back with the same, horrifying stories. Not only were the UKIP-ers and the racists telling them to ‘fuck off’, so were many of their own voters. The issue, always, was migration. It became a way of telling the urban elite that small-town Britain had had enough of neoliberal misery.

When Labour, in the last week of the campaign, tried to promise a renegotiation of the free movement rules, few even heard the message. Their own leader, Jeremy Corbyn, could not be induced to utter the promise and, in any case, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker stated baldly that it could not happen.

Thus, in the final days, once the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox had quelled the intense anti-migrant rhetoric, people were faced with a very clear message from the Leave camp: leave Europe and take control of migration, or stay and face unlimited migration, wage suppression and cultural stress.

The assumption of the political elite — Labour’s leftwingers included — was that this message could not break through the mid-40% mark. In the end, with up to 33% of Asians and 27% of black voters voting to leave, that pushed the final majority against the EU to 52% (3).

The young, among whom support for Europe was running at 75%, were the only group where turnout was abysmal. Less than half of all young people under 24 bothered to vote, compared to turnouts of 75% among the old.

Ultimately it was a demonstration of the concept of ‘ideological hegemony’. Everywhere I went during the last week of the campaign — when polls said 24% of voters had still to make up their minds — I heard working class people confidently and intelligently arguing the case for Brexit. My hunch is that a small but decisive percentage of the Leave vote were left-leaning workers or salariat who were swayed by their peers towards the end.

Problem for the left

The implications for the left project in Britain are profound. Shock amongst the establishment has left the Conservatives scrambling for a coherent line. Most likely, from the indications as I write, they will have to unite around a project of staying inside the European Economic Area (EEA). That would avoid renegotiating the trade deal; it would involve accepting all future EU rule changes, without influence, contributing to the EU and accepting free movement — though with the right to apply an emergency brake.

The problem is that the Leave campaign was hostile to the EEA option, because it requires free movement in principle.

But even if Britain stays in the EEA, the core premise of all centre-leftism since the 1970s — EU membership, the social chapter and ever-closer union — is gone.

Labour has to define itself against the new reality — and that reality is uncertain. No serious part of the financial elite wants any kind of economic nationalism. In fact the pro-Leave elite have convinced themselves that Britain can become an ultra-global economy — a big Singapore — floating between the major trading blocs.

This will fail. Indeed it is likely that Brexit itself will. It will fail to deliver higher wages or tangibly lower inflation. It will drive financial capital offshore and what little manufacturing investment there is will go back to the European heartlands. This, in turn, will slash the official estimates of the economy’s capacity to grow long term. Set against the UK’s debt and trade deficits, that may look so bad that tangible capital flight begins.

The failure will be exacerbated by political paralysis, with both major traditions in Britain, liberal conservatism and Labourism, historically centred on the EU project.

The real problem both for the left and the liberal centre of British politics is what happens once Brexit fails. The forces of nationalism and xenophobia are not assuaged by the Brexit victory. A small but vicious spate of pogromist violence broke out against the right’s two target groups — Poles and Muslims. But that is nothing compared to what we will see if the economy slides into recession.

Meanwhile there is a kind of middle-class hysteria: petitions for a re-run of the vote; calls for parliament to sabotage it; hatred expressed on social media for the ‘uneducated’, white, manual working class; hatred of the old expressed by a young generation half of whom couldn’t be bothered to vote, but whose life chances are now seriously altered by the outcome.

Meanwhile Scotland is headed out of the UK. What looked likely over a ten-year period is now certain over three. There will be a second referendum; large parts of the Labour-loyal pro-unionist vote will switch to independence in order to keep Scotland in the EU. The United Kingdom will break up.

Divided nation

For the left, the immediate opportunity lies in an election. There is no certainty the incoming Tory leader will call one, but it’s hard to negotiate without a mandate. Fearing that a left-led Labour Party could actually win the election, its Blairite right wing launched an immediate coup against Corbyn, to try to prevent him from leading Labour into the election.

This was the self-destructive myopia of a political generation not trained for conflict and adversity. Faced with the most significant political catastrophe of their lifetime, and the chance to assume the mantle of leading the nation, Labour MPs chose to fight each other.

If an election happens, Labour should call for an electoral pact with the SNP, the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru and the Green Party. The aim would be to prevent UKIP gaining a strong foothold in parliament and to stop a Tory government. The price will have to be constitutional reform: a switch to proportional representation voting, and a no-penalty exit plan allowing Scotland to leave the UK without the kind of economic sabotage the Tories and the Bank of England threatened in 2014. I have called the strategy ProgrExit — progressive exit — and there are signs that it has greater popularity among the activists of these parties than among their leaderships, who are trying to work out how to survive.

For Scotland, in the case of independence, the capital flight threat of 2014 is now reversed. As the EU’s outpost on the British mainland, it can expect inward investment from both finance and even productive industries, should it achieve independence.

Right now it feels like the whole of British politics and society has been divided into two; the one half symbolised by ‘white van man’, the manual worker of low educational achievement, parading the national flag from the window of his work vehicle; the other half symbolised by the bearded hipster — his trips to Berlin for art, Ibiza for dancing, now in question, and the assumed cultural dominance of his social liberalism and anti-racism under threat.

Labour’s strategic problem has been how to unite these two sociological tribes across four nationalities. Now it is how to frame the offer of social justice and democracy to a population reeling amid uncertainty.

Britain has walked away from the global order before — in 1931, when its decision to leave the Gold Standard triggered its fragmentation and collapse. But at that time British society was united; the conflict between left and right, worker and boss, was always contained within a common cultural story.

This time it is a leap into the dark. Economically there is no design for a post-EU Britain but the near certainty of a short-term recession; socially Britain is divided so viscerally it feels like a culture war; and with Scotland on the way out, the United Kingdom is headed for breakup.

The world’s oldest capitalist economy and polity will break in two. Its cultural narrative is already shattered. That is David Cameron’s achievement, aided and abetted by a Labour Party at war with itself and a young generation so turned off from politics that — at this crucial moment — half of them refused to choose.