The class bias of the Brexit debate

If the organisers are to be believed, and why would they lie, around one million people were on a demonstration last week calling for a second referendum. Or perhaps not a second referendum, but rather revoking article 50 altogether. No matter, the demo was certainly large and included Labour frontbenchers John McDonnell and Diane Abbott both of whom spoke after finishing the business of derailing the Government’s Brexit plan in Parliament.

The size of the demo has prompted some, including Alistair Campbell, to claim that such a large show of public support cannot be ignored. The organisers have claimed that it was the largest peacetime demo in the UK, conveniently forgetting the march against the Iraq War which was attended by between 2-3 million people and duly ignored by a Government one of whose chief advisers was, you already know the punchline, Alistair Campbell.

I did not attend the demo on 22^nd October because I was watching the Rugby World Cup, but more importantly because I fundamentally disagree with its demands. I have not been an advocate of a second referendum and have stated so in this blog, and the same reasons would clearly lead me to reject calls to revoke Article 50.

I have written before about why I think the claims that the mood of the country has changed are based on a flawed analysis of some very selective polls, and won’t bore you by making the same arguments here. Rather, I was intrigued by a claim in The Observer that “this may well be the most good-natured and well-mannered of protest movements the country has ever mustered.” I am not sure what protest movements Observer journalists attend, but having been on marches against pit closures, against nuclear weapons, against Clause 28, against the Poll Tax, against student loans, against various wars including Iraq (I’m not boasting here, my marching has taken place over a number of years) I can honestly say that the only time the good humour of the marchers is broken is when they have been attacked by the police. But, I guess the point being made is to contrast the polite, and witty, remainers with the coarse and uncouth Brexiteers. And, here lies the rub.

We are now told that the fault line running through politics is one of remain or leave. What this ignores is the class nature of the entire Brexit debate, and the way in which remain and leave have come to represent very different social  constituencies.

There was a banner on a previous ‘People’s Vote’ March which read “52% thick, 48% right”. Whilst this was only one banner on a large demo I think it gives away something of the social snobbery of ardent remainers.

We have to go back to 2016 to the referendum to remind ourselves that the remain campaign was supported by, almost, the entire British establishment. The only political party that were unequivocally pro-Brexit were UKIP who despite not having a single MP were never off Question Time and had done enough to spook the Tory Party into calling the referendum in the first place. The Institute of Directors, the Confederation of British Industry, the TUC, even the Institute of Fiscal Studies were in the remain camp. A handful of businesses, most notably Witheringspoons, and a cross-section of the more “eccentric” (I believe it is politically incorrect to refer to them as a bunch of nutters) MP’s including Kate Hoey, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Peter Bone were in the leave camp. The point is that you did not have to be in any shape or form ‘radical’ to be for remain. Indeed, some radicals, including the Communist Party, were on the leave side and whilst by no means a significant number, many socialists took a Bennite position of regarding the EU as a capitalist club we were best out of. To be fair there is considerable merit in that argument but it barely got a hearing during the campaign.

The remain campaign was dominated by an establishment elite who took it for granted that ordinary people would do as they were told and vote to remain in an EU the same remain-supporting establishment had spent 30 years criticising and scapegoating.

Nobody knows for certain how different social groups voted, but according to IPSOS-Mori “Younger, more middle class, more educated and BME voters chose to remain; older, working class, less educated and white voters opted to leave.” That is not to say that all young people, or all middle class people voted to remain or vice versa that all working class people voted to leave. And, even if those broad categories are correct it does not tell us why they chose to vote that way.

In a recent report Matthew Goodwin, a leave advocate, cites his own research in which he claims that leave voters, far from being ‘thick’ knew exactly what they were voting for:  “The two dominant motives were to return powers from the EU to the nation state and to lower the overall level of immigration into Britain.” It doesn’t matter whether you agree with them or not, the point is that they had a very clear idea of what they wanted. It also matters little whether you believe that this is what they will actually get. That people are, in your opinion, wrong is not a good reason to void a democratic vote.

But, I have come to the conclusion that for ardent remainers all these arguments are a smokescreen masking what they really feel. Let’s be honest, the remain campaign is, essentially, made up of the middle classes. Now to be sure whilst many of these people do not normally turn up to demonstrate a good few of them will consider themselves to be on the left. They may not be political Conservatives but many are certainly socially conservative. The reason is that mostly they do quite well out of the system.

Whilst the middle classes have felt squeezed they do tend to have good jobs, often in the public sector, they have pensions, nice homes in areas with good schools and can afford a holiday or two abroad most years. I don’t resent them any of this (it pretty much describes where I ended up, after all), neither do I doubt their passion for remaining in Europe.

But, the middle classes have a tendency to expect things to go their way, and they also have a tendency to think of themselves as better than the working classes. Often they take a condescending attitude to those they consider their social inferiors, and whilst they treat their cleaners, or those who serve them, well they do not see them as their equals.

So, when those poorly educated, uncouth, types lacking in manners and the social graces won the referendum it could not but end in acrimony. If the middle class, with their education and manners, were convinced that staying in Europe was right, then it must be right. And, if it was right how could parliament be permitted to respect a referendum which had to be flawed, unlawful, misunderstood or the work of racist thugs. The only right thing to do in such a scenario is to ignore those who were too thick to understand the consequences of their own actions and have a second referendum.

And, that was their demand. Until recently. Their enthusiasm for a second referendum has been based on the assumption that this time they would win and their rather cosy lifestyles could continue. As could poverty, austerity, anti-trade union laws and a system that sees the rich get richer, the middle survive and the poor get poorer.

But, something changed as it became apparent that a second referendum was a huge leap in the dark. It is apparent from recent opinion polls that a remain victory is not the taken for granted that was once thought. Democracy it turns out is dangerous because those thick, uncouth types could win again. So the demand has changed to simply call the whole thing off and revoke Article 50. As if it was all a mistake. It is a very British response to losing.

The beauty of this approach is it reminds the working class of their place in society. They can have opinions provided they remain deferential. They must not think that, collectively, they can change things. Better to maintain the illusion of a meritocracy by allowing the odd working class person into the middle class. After all, so long as there is a willing supply of people prepared to do the work that middle class people see as below them, that is not a problem.

But it is a problem. A problem of class bias, where a class with the means to block the progress of a subordinate class do so not simply by formal barriers but by ensuring that their own offspring have all the best opportunities. Ask yourself where the journalists, the judges, the auteurs come from. It is now almost impossible to break into a middle class career by effort and talent alone without having a parent or sibling to open those vital doors for you.

This has nothing to do with Brexit. Class privilege and class prejudice has been a persistent feature of British society for decades. But Brexit is the middle class asserting itself as the class with the right to make decisions for the working class against a situation where the working class were given the opportunity to defer to their betters and refused.

When I see a million people on the streets of London marching to remain in the EU I see a group of people who have split the country into two halves. The right half, them, and the wrong half, everybody else. I accept that they are sincere in their beliefs but I wonder whether any of them recognise the irony of demanding, in the name of democracy, that a democratic vote should be ignored because the wrong side, albeit with a majority, won.

I wonder also how many of these people cared so much about Europe that they bothered to vote in Euro elections prior to the referendum. In 2009, the last elections in the UK prior to UKIP using them as a means to argue against the EU turnout in the UK was just 35%, compared to 43% across the EU as a whole. Perhaps all those people on the streets were enthusiastic Euro voters who could name their MEPs and explain the principle of subsidiarity, but that would be a remarkable coincidence.

 I wonder also how many of those people understood the economics of the EU sufficiently to explain why they imposed public sector spending cuts on Greece in 2012 which led to  the suspension of 30,000 civil servants on partial pay. Or why the EU forced the Irish Republic to slash Government spending by 4bn euros, with all public servants' pay cut by at least 5% and social welfare reduced. Meanwhile, the EU agreed to bail out Portugal in January 2012 in return for widespread privatisation, which led to unemployment rising to 14.8%.

Perhaps some of those million people can explain how this represents “the best deal we can get” but they might argue that this is in the past and the EU is a beacon of justice and equality now. Which does raise the question of why the EU has not lifted a finger to help Catalan independence campaigners as the Spanish government have imprisoned its leaders for up to 13 years.

I’m not saying that the EU is uniformly bad or that membership of the EU is necessarily a bad thing, but I find it odd that a million marchers, predominantly employed in the public sector, put such faith in an institution that has shown clearly that in a debate between private profits and public provision there is only ever going to be one winner.

Many on the March would no doubt balk at the suggestion that they are part of the establishment. Many, probably the majority, have never voted Tory in their lives. Many are no doubt members of trade unions and if they take a paper it is more likely to be The Guardian than the Daily Mail. But compare the kid gloves treatment of one million people on the streets of London to the hostile reaction of the Metropolitan Police to a handful of Extinction Rebellion protestors.

Could it be that Extinction Rebellion get that reaction because they are a threat to the establishment, whilst the remain voters not only represent no threat to the establishment, they are a part of it. We are constantly told that class politics are a thing of the past, perhaps what Brexit has shown us is that class politics are very much alive and kicking, and that the class with economic power are not necessarily just those who own the means of production but those who benefit from the exploitation of the class with nothing to sell but their labour power.