The Left Case for Brexit. Richard Tuck

16 May 2016

      By mid-May it was becoming likely that Hillary Clinton would win the Democrats’ nomination for President, but Bernie Sanders’ supporters still had some reason for hope. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 53% of respondents said they would vote for Sanders if Trump were the Republican nominee, and only 39% for Trump, whereas Clinton and Trump were in a dead heat ...

      One of the curious ways in which British and American politics continue to run parallel with one another – think Thatcher/Reagan and Clinton/Blair – is that in both countries at the moment class war, and class contempt, have unexpectedly reappeared. In both countries, moreover, one of the key issues has been international trade: in the US the argument is over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and in the UK the argument is over Brexit. But on both sides of the Atlantic, trade has come to stand in for a much wider range of threats which the old working class faces. The difference between the two countries, however, is that in America the Left has understood this and – to a degree – has been able genuinely to speak to it, while in Britain the Left has remained imprisoned in the mindset of the Clinton/Blair years, however much it might ostensibly deny it.

The degree to which commentators in this new world feel able to express their contempt for the pathetic losers stranded by the glorious capitalism of the recent past is quite astonishing. From the United States comes the infamous article by Kevin D. Williamson from the National Review in March 2016 about Garbutt, a decaying industrial town in upstate New York:

      The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American under-class is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt...³

      But that can be exactly matched by a column in the London Times eighteen months earlier by the socially liberal Conservative Matthew Parris writing about a by-election in Clacton-on-Sea, a decaying seaside town in Essex. UKIP duly went on to win the seat.

      [U]nderstand that Clacton-on-Sea is going nowhere. Its voters are going nowhere, it’s rather sad, and there’s nothing more to say. This is Britain on crutches. This is tracksuit-and-trainers Britain, tattoo-parlour Britain, all-our-yesterdays Britain.

      So of course Ukip 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