Editorial - Picking up the Pieces

Early on the 24th of June 2016, people woke up to hear that the country had voted to leave the European Union. On breakfast TV and morning radio, the news broke in the dim dawn hours. In fields in Somerset, those attending Glastonbury festival would have heard a sad voice repeating over hundreds of tannoy systems: ‘the United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union. I’m sorry’. Elsewhere, celebrations had only just begun.

“Since then, comments on the division of the country have been the predominant feature of our media, political commentary and dinner table conversations alike”

Since then, comments on the division of the country have been the predominant feature of our media, political commentary and dinner table conversations alike.It seems clear that we have grown more divided as a nation. The 2019 election was one of the most divisive and polarising in modern history. Home Office figures released this autumn show that hate crime has doubled in the last 10 years.¹ Huge chasms in political ideas have become clear – not just between the two main Westminster parties, but in the towns, cities, villages and communities they represent. Using six years of polling and focus groups, the HOPE not hate, campaign have shown the country is experiencing huge pessimism about it’s future – alongside a sharp rise in extreme Islamophobia and a greater normalisation of far-right ideas.²

As the nation divides, the political concept of a United Kingdom ‘union’ looks closer to disintegrating. The independence movement remains strong in Scotland, after a tightly run referendum. Sinn Fein have publicly called for a ballot on a united Ireland within the next five years.³ And in Wales, where support for full independence has generally been weakest, new polling has found support for an independent Wales in the EU stands at 33%. Only eight per cent supported an independent Wales last year.⁴

How do we understand this level of division and disillusionment with the state of the nation?

BREXIT AS THE ‘GREAT CONTEXT’

French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously argued “il n’ya a pas de hors texts”. From the French, this is often mistranslated as “there is nothing outside the text”, but it is perhaps better understood as “there is nothing outside of context”.⁵ With this, he posited that we do not interpret the world objectively. Rather, our social status, our identity, our politics and feelings are always understood through and within the context of the epoch in which we live.

We can understand Brexit as the great context to the state of our nation today. Such an understanding suggests Brexit has three functions. First, it illuminates divisions that existed before the vote, but which the establishment had ignored, wilfully or otherwise. Second, it has further catalysed divisions that already existed – it has brought them into sharper focus and ensured they are felt more regularly and more keenly. Third, and perhaps most interestingly, it defines how we understand divisions - defining which divisions and experiences have most meaning, how we understand injustice and the terms on which we understand the problems we collectively face.

Put more simply, Brexit not only exposes and creates divides, but it defines and colours every interpretation of which divides actually matter, how they have emerged and what we do about them now. It brings certain experiences, identities and ideas to the forefront.

This is clear from how ‘leaver’ and remainer have come to signify not only how someone voted in the referendum, or how they feel about Europe as a policy agenda, but rather sophisticated and complete identifies. Almost everyone in the country, if they close their eyes, can imagine their own stereotype of what a leaver and remainer might look like.

“Almost everyone in the country, if they close their eyes, can imagine their own stereotype of what a leaver and remainer looks like”

Archetypal of this are the typographies mapped out by David Goodhart in his book The Road to Somewhere.⁶ There he identifies, in strenuous detail, a binary opposition between the working-class, less educated, less urban and worse travelled ‘somewhere’ leaver; and the middle-class, internationalist, graduate and adaptable ‘anywhere’ remainer. Brexit has set the dividing lines of political debate far beyond a single policy area.

“Through the campaign, the dominant issues became immigration and the failure of integration”

THE BATTLE FOR BREXIT: INTERPRETING WHAT HAPPENED

Brexit is not a neutral context. Attempts to explain Brexit are attempts to define what issues, identities and struggles matter – so are by their nature political. This is a fact more regressive voices have been quicker to grasp. They have been much more successful in putting forward convenient explanations that maintain a privileged status quo, rather than challenge economic and social convention. Of course, this does not come without a heavy dose of irony. If Brexit becomes a way to reiterate an establishment, right-wing or status quo message about the state of the nation, it does so despite having an anti-establishment support base.

We can trace instances of this happening in practice. Two weeks into the Brexit campaign, Ipsos Mori began reporting that immigration had overtaken the economy as the British public’s top concern. Through the campaign, the dominant issues became immigration and the failure of integration. The mind immediately turns to Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster, an image strikingly similar to propaganda used by the Nazi regime in Germany. But the weaponisation of the idea that Turkey could join the EU by Dominic Cummings’ official campaign played its own significant role.

Since the vote, both the right and the left have conspired to accept migration as an issue underpinning the Brexit vote and, thus, the state of division in the UK. Theresa May’s most famous red line was an end to freedom of movement. Labour met this not with a compelling argument of their own, but by adopting the end to freedom of movement as their own official policy. This follows a long tradition of Labour conceding to right wing attacks on migration – Blair often faced criticism and made concessions on the issues in the 2000s; ‘controls on immigration’ became something of a catchphrase for Labour ahead of the 2015 election, featuring on mugs and other official party merchandise.

Yet, as others have powerfully argued, migration does not sit comfortably as a sufficient explanation for the leave vote. Places with high levels of immigration often voted remain, including some of the most diverse boroughs of London.⁷ And many places that voted leave have some of the lowest levels of immigration in the country (albeit that a faster rate of change in immigration was correlated with the leave vote).⁸ Much more relevant as a predictor of a leave vote is whether someone can live a good life in their community, and whether they live in an economically prosperous part of the country – that is, it is far more clearly related to the consequences of austerity and 40 years of Thatcherite consensus.⁹

This is not the only way that the right has used Brexit to tell stories about the state of our country, defined in ways convenient to their own ideologies. We might easily point to the neoliberal tropes of growth, free markets and unfettered trade that are core to both the establishment leave and remain arguments. If Brexit was driven by discontent with the economic consensus of four decades, that the main remain and leave voices both continuously evoke neoliberal arguments is a bitter irony. As with immigration, it is indicative of how Brexit provides the context to how we understand division, identity and politics in 2019 – and how regressive voices have much better defined that context in a way convenient to the establishment status-quo.

Progressive voices must do better at challenging these views, and in creating their own, compelling stories about Brexit and the post-Brexit world. Accepting and playing to regressive narratives is not a viable alternative. In his piece for this issue, Adrian Kreutz provides a warning to the followers of this approach, through the story of Aufstehen in Germany.

“Many people who experience very real injustices – LGBT people, for example – voted majority remain”

“The progressive project must turn to reconstructing the country, and our relationships with one another”