will do well in the by-election ...
If you want to win Cambridge you may have to let go of Clacton.
From the train leaving Stratford at platform 10a, you can see Canary Wharf [where many of the biggest banks in London are based], humming with a sense of the possible. You must turn your back on that if you want to go to Clacton. I don’t, and the Tories shouldn’t ...4
As Parris’s invective testifies, in Britain UKIP, whose raison d’être since its foundation in 1993 has been to get Britain out of the EU, is the movement which has managed to reach these voters, and indeed in many northern towns, and now South Wales, has managed to peel them away from their traditional Labour loyalties. UKIP is universally despised by the liberal intelligentsia, and in this respect as in many others it resembles the Trump wing of the Republican Party; though since it operates outside the traditional party structures it has very little chance of achieving any real political breakthrough in ordinary elections. But in the current Brexit campaign it is yoked in a somewhat uneasy fashion to quite prominent figures from the Conservative Party, with the campaign as a whole coming to look rather more like an insurgency within the mainstream right-wing party – and with the one of the main leaders of the campaign, the former Mayor of London Boris Johnson, as many commentators have pointed out, strangely resembling Trump, including his distinctive hairstyle, his reputation made partly through appearances on TV shows, and a history of womanising. There are important differences, though: Johnson as Mayor presided enthusiastically and with great popularity over what must be the most culturally mixed city on the planet, and it is hard to imagine a President Trump addressing Congress in Latin, as Johnson on occasion addressed the London Assembly. He is also genuinely funny and charming, in a way Trump will never be. His success as Mayor in fact illustrates an important truth about Brexit (which may not have a parallel in the US): there is little enthusiasm for the EU among the large non-European population of the capital, and of the country as a whole. South Asians, for example, understand that EU immigration policies will inevitably make it harder for people like them to come to Britain in the future.
Nevertheless, the similarities between the electorate which has been looking to Trump and Sanders as its defenders against a globalising, capitalistic and meritocratic elite (with this last trait perhaps being the most significant, as Thomas Frank pointed out in a brilliant book5), and the electorate which is currently looking to a Brexit, are very striking. But as I said, there is one major difference: there is no British Bernie Sanders. For a while it looked as if the new leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, might play the role; he even has a long history of opposition to the EU and voted against it in the last referendum. But he has disappointed almost all his followers, and has allowed himself to be captured by the pro-EU forces in his party. The Labour figures associated with Brexit have failed to catch the public’s eye, and the result is that Brexit is seen as largely a movement within the Conservatives. And yet, as the American primaries have shown, there is a real left-wing case to be made for the necessity of giving this deracinated working-class electorate a real voice of the traditional kind, and the one American politician who has seen this has so far reaped unexpectedly great rewards. But in Britain almost all my friends say that they cannot support Brexit because of the political and cultural identities of the leaders of the Brexit campaign, even though most of them simultaneously voice scepticism about the EU, and even though most of them are long-range enthusiasts for Sanders.
Why is there no Sanders campaigning for Brexit? Why in a country without a major modern tradition of socialism is a self-described socialist doing so well, while in a country with a long-standing supposedly socialist party no one is willing to step up and fight this cause? The last time the question was put to the vote, heavyweight figures from Labour campaigned against the Common Market, including the man now seen as in some sense the model for Corbyn, Tony Benn. But there is no one like that within the party today. Some rather feeble gestures are currently being made towards the old working-class English electorate: Tristram Hunt, the former Shadow Secretary of State for Education (and, oddly enough, a biographer of Engels), has recently urged his party not to neglect it, and allow it to fall into the hands of UKIP. But Hunt and the figures like him in the party can offer nothing any more which that electorate wants: it has correctly perceived that the only kinds of change which will make a real difference to it are precisely those which are precluded by Britain’s membership of the EU, not to mention by all the structures (such as an independent central bank) put in place by the last Labour government. Labour politicians still believe that political science – the technical organisation of a party – can win back its lost ground; but as Hillary Clinton is discovering, only political theory can do that.
So the question remains: why no British Sanders? One explanation might be the institutional difference between American and English politics: it is hard to make the kind of run outside conventional party structures which both Trump and Sanders have managed. But this is not a satisfactory explanation, since the Brexit campaign offers exactly this kind of opportunity, and Johnson, who is not exactly a conventional party figure, has duly seized it. I think the true explanation, unfortunately, is Britain’s membership of the EU itself. Resisting the TPP, or even annulling NAFTA, are simple tasks compared with the difficulties of extracting Britain from the EU. Faced with that, a generation of Labour politicians have lost their nerve. It then becomes a vicious circle as, with no one on the Left willing to defend Brexit, the cause looks as if it is (to put it in American terms) purely Trump – and then the politicians, and most party members, feel ashamed at being associated with it. Consequently there is no way of recovering Labour’s lost working-class support: as in Scotland, the party drank from the poisoned chalice of the EU, and it may be too late to find the antidote.
Notes
3 Kevin D. Williamson, ‘Chaos in the Family, Chaos in the State: The White Working Class’s Dysfunction’, National Review, 17 March 2016. 4 Matthew Parris, ‘Tories should turn their backs on Clacton’, The Times, 6 September 2014. 5 Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan, 2016).
6 June 2016: The Left Case for Brexit
On 6 June 2016 I published an article entitled ‘The Left Case for Brexit’ in the online edition of Dissent magazine,6 which attracted a great deal of attention on both sides of the Atlantic, including a recommendation by Charles Moore in The Spectator of 18 June. The article was based on some posts I had written during the previous month, including one which responded to an article by Yanis Varoufakis published on 5 April in The Guardian containing an extract from his new book, And the Weak Suffer What They Must, which was published the same week. Varoufakis ended his article by saying that, ‘Just like in the early 1930s, Britain and Greece cannot escape Europe by building a mental or legislative wall behind which to hide. Either we band together to democratise – or we suffer the consequences of a pan-European nightmare that no border can keep out.’ This is an edited version of the article, incorporating some more of those earlier posts.
On the question of whether Britain should leave the European Union, the British Left has been nearly uniform in supporting ‘Remain’. This option seems especially attractive since those on the Right advocating ‘Leave’ range from open racists concerned with the recent growth of immigration to romantic global free-marketeers. For entirely understandable cultural and political reasons, the Left has not wished to be associated with that crowd. But in supporting ‘Remain’, the Left is making a profound mistake, one capable of destroying its future, whether Britain is in or out of the EU.
There are several flaws in the case made by Left advocates of Remain; here I want to consider three in particular. First is the idea, fostered especially by the dynamic Greek former finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, that Left politics today can only be advanced by concerted action within the EU. As I will argue, that is a fantasy, and by adhering to it the British Left is likely to undermine itself seriously – as the Greek Left may already be doing.
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