On one day in June last year, just over half of the people who could be bothered to vote, voted to leave the EU. I voted the other way.
And people voted for all sorts of reasons, but people were not ignorant or stupid, unless they chose to be. There was plenty of information out there. Basically if you believed in the economic argument you voted remain and if anything else was important you voted leave, which essentially meant you voted to leave if “immigration” or “sovereignty” was the important issue.
& it is probably a step too far to say that those voting on the basis of immigration were out and out racists, though clearly a racist argument was made by the leave campaign and people voting for that reason have failed to distance themselves from that argument. But fear of immigrants, of the foreign, is xenophobic at the very least.
& sovereignty is a tricky topic because the word can mean so many different things to different people. At some level it’s tempting to view this as a cleaned up version of immigration ie. control over our borders and anxiety about foreigners. At another maybe it’s anxiety about the role of the EU in setting rules and regulations that apply to the UK, and the relatively low status and lack of respect paid to EU MEPs in this country, a lack of understanding about the UK’s ability to influence and effect change within the EU context and structure.
Either way, if you voted for leave because of immigration or sovereignty, you have been taken for fools. According to government ministers, immigration numbers post-brexit will increase. The government of the day has used the brexit process to attempt a power grab from parliament throughout and continues to undermine and diminish parliamentary sovereignty at every opportunity. The government plans to transfer all EU legislation onto the UK statute book where it will ossify. It takes cross-party support to change, amend or repeal statute and as a consequence the UK government structure is incredibly badly suited to deal with such a huge body of statute.
As time goes by, the EU will amend it’s own laws and the UK has no practical process to amend the legacy laws written onto its books.
No surprise – I believe that brexit will be a disaster for the UK.
But not every brexit platitude can or should be ignored. As the NYT wrote in a recent article, just because it’s something that Trump says, doesn’t mean it’s wrong or trivial.
What brexit issues need to be addressed? Here’s my list:
• immigration needs to be seen to be controlled. Freedom of movement in the EU was never meant or required to be without constraint or limit. People are allowed to move to find work, no more and no less. Foreigner in Belgium who fail to find a job after 3 months are deported. We should do the same. & that would require introducing an ID card and system. It would mean requiring people to register, to show their ID cards before claiming healthcare or welfare. All of this could have been done decades ago and wasn’t because it will inevitably cost more money than it’s worth, but it seems necessary to reassure people that someone somewhere is managing the process.
• The immigration argument is in part racist, in particular feeding off anxiety about uncontrolled immigration from muslim countries such as Turkey, and refugees naturalised elsewhere in the EU making their way to the UK. it’s important to recognise that parts of the Muslim world have a problem with pluralism — gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism — and suggesting that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue. It means visible active engagement with everyday Muslim citizens
• The British people want a government focused on growing the economic pie, not just redistributing it. We have a problem with globalisation, with automation wiping out middle-skilled work and we need to generate more working class jobs to anchor communities. We have a problem with the rise of precarious, short term, high risk employment and the resulting financial insecurity. We have a problem with the concentration of wealth in London and other metropolitan areas, within the Service sector.
The brexit vote was significantly different to the election of Trump in many ways yet similar in one striking fashion: people voted with their emotions in large numbers. Brexit gave many people an opportunity to say loud and clear that they were unhappy with the status quo, whether that meant poverty, the haves and have-nots, or the scale and speed of change within an ever more diverse society.
The UK government needs to re-connect with the electorate. And when you connect with voters, they feel respected, and when they feel respected, they will listen to anything — including big issues that are true even if socialists believe them. Such as the fact that a majority of their children and grandchildren like being Europeans as well as British.