Britain makes its choice; shockwaves rock world
John Harris analyses the bitterness that found expression in a shock for the ages.
‘‘If you’ve got money, you vote ‘in’,’’ she said, with a bracing certainty. ‘‘If you haven’t got money, you vote ‘out’.’’
We were in Collyhurst, the hardpressed neighbourhood on the northern edge of Manchester city centre last Wednesday, and I had yet to find a ‘‘remain’’ voter.
The woman I was talking to spoke of the lack of a local park, or playground, and her sense that all the good stuff went to the regenerated wonderland of big city Manchester, 10 minutes down the road.
Only an hour earlier, I had been in Manchester at a graduate recruitment fair, where nine out of 10 of our interviewees were supporting ‘‘remain’’, and some voices spoke about ‘‘leave’’ voters with a cold superiority.
‘‘In the end, this is the 21st century,’’ said one twentysomething. ‘‘Get with it.’’ Not for the first time, the atmosphere around the referendum had the sulphurous whiff not just of inequality, but a kind of misshapen class war.
This is about so much more than the European Union. It is about class, and inequality, and a politics now so professionalised that it has left most people staring at the rituals of Westminster with a mixture of anger and bafflement.
Look at the map of those results, and that huge island of ‘‘in’’ voting in London and the southeast, contrasted with comparable shares for ‘‘leave’’ in such places as Great Yarmouth (71 per cent), Castle Point in Essex (73 per cent), and Redcar and Cleveland (66 cent). Here is a country so imbalanced it has effectively fallen over.
For six years now, often with my colleague John Domokos, I have been travelling around the UK trying to divine the national mood.
As an early warning, there was the temporary arrival of the British National Party in electoral politics from 2006 onwards, playing on mounting popular anger about immigration from the EU ‘‘accession states’’, in the midst of Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s ‘‘flexible’’ job market, and a mounting housing crisis.
A few years later, we met builders in South Shields who told us that their hourly rate had come down by £3 thanks to new arrivals from Eastern Europe; the mother in Stourbridge who wanted a new school for ‘‘our kids’’; the former docker in Liverpool who looked at rows of empty warehouses and exclaimed, ‘‘Where’s the work?’’
In Peterborough in 2013, we found a town riven by cold resentments, where people claimed agencies would only hire non-UK nationals who would work insane shifts for risible rates.
In the UK Independence Party heartlands of Lincolnshire, we chronicled communities built around agricultural work and food processing that were cleanly divided in two, between optimistic new arrivals and resentful, miserable locals – where party leader Nigel Farage could pitch up and do back-to-back public meetings to rapturous crowds.
Even in the cities that were meant to unanimously spurn the very idea of Brexit, things have always been complicated. Manchester was split 60:40 in favour of remain; in Birmingham last week, I met British-Asian people who talked about leaving the EU with a similar passion and frustration to plenty of white people on the same side.
In so many places, there has long been the same mixture of deep worry and often seething anger.
What defines these furies is often clear enough: a terrible shortage of homes, an impossibly precarious job market, a too-often overlooked sense that men who would once have been certain in their identity as miners, or steelworkers, now feel demeaned and ignored.
Last year, 3.8 million people voted for the UK Independence Party. The Labour Party’s vote is in a state of seemingly unstoppable decline as its membership becomes ever-more metropolitan and middle class, problems the ascendancy of leader Jeremy Corbyn has seemingly made worse.
England and Wales were characterised by an ever-growing vacuum, until Prime Minister David Cameron – now surely revealed as the most disastrous holder of the office in our democratic history – made the decision that might turn out to have utterly changed the terms of our politics.
Cameron evidently thought that the whole debate could be cleanly started and finished in a matter of months. His Eton contemporary Boris Johnson opportunistically embraced the cause of Brexit in much the same spirit.
What they had not figured out was that a diffuse, scattershot popular anger had not yet decisively found a powerful enough outlet, but that the staging of a referendum and the cohering of the leave cause would deliver exactly that.
And so it came to pass: the cause of leaving the EU, for so long the preserve of cranks and chancers, attracted a share of the popular vote for which any modern political party would give its eye teeth. We all know the cruel irony that sits in the midst of all this story: that Britain – or what is left of it – will now take a sharp turn to the right, and the problems that have fed into this moment will only get worse.
Think about that woman in Collyhurst: ‘‘If you’ve got no money, you vote out.’’
Therein lies not just the againstthe-odds triumph of the leavers, but evidence of huge failures that the stunned mainstream of politics has only just begun to acknowledge, let alone do anything about.
Britain – or what is left of it – will now take a sharp turn to the right.