Prior to the referendum the tectonic plates of British politics had been shifting for a long time. Similar changes also occurred in the other developed capitalist economies. These tectonic shifts are now causing political earthquakes (Trump, Brexit, AFD, the League) and are now fragmenting not just the previously existing system of political parties but rendering the old Left to Right, via the Centre, spectrum of politics less and less relevant. So far the most successful insurgent response to these deep shifts has come from the populist nationalist right. That is not surprising. A core pillar of consensus politics for a generation has been that individual nations states cannot buck the market, all they can do is adapt to the global markets. This consensus about the weakness of the national state is most strongly institutionalised in the EU system. In fact there are good reasons to believe that this belief in the impotency of the nation state in the face of rampant global capital is profoundly wrong, unfortunately much of the Left (which is ideologically predisposed to internationalist action and often suspicious of national patriotism) continues to distance itself from the notion of reasserting national action. This has left the unchallenged political terrain open to right wing populists who have made restoring the power of the nation state a central pillar. A key component of the populist case for reasserting national power is the restoration of control of national borders and the reduction in immigration.
The great crisis and change in global capitalism in the late 1970s and through the 1980s profoundly changed the political economy of the Advanced Capitalist Democracies (ACD). Although uneven all ACD saw the same sorts of developments. These were:
The very sharp decline of Fordist large scale industrial production and employment.
The consequent weakening of organised labour. The decline of Fordist industry undermined crucial components of organised labour and almost simultaneously the collapse of communism and the transition of China into a major capitalist manufacturing nation brought hundreds of millions of workers into the global labour market further weakening organised labour. What were previously large integrated factory production lines (relatively easy to organises into unions) became extended transnational value chains (almost impossible to organise)
The rise of the knowledge economy and the spread of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) which profoundly reorganised production and the commercial system. The spread of ICT didn’t just happen but was actively promoted by the government’s of the ACDs, primarily through a vast increase of the number of people entering higher education, and through support for R&D. The active national state never went away – it just changed focus.
The bifurcation of the labour force into higher educated, higher paid knowledge workers clustered in metropolitan knowledge agglomerates, and the left behind workers and communities abandoned by the retreat of Fordist mass production especially in the peripheral and poorest regions.
Even though the lost industrial jobs were mostly replaced by service sector jobs the decline of Fordist industry had momentous consequences because it broke the sort of old style labour movement working class solidarity that had bound together unskilled and semi skilled workers to skilled workers and even lower level managers and self employed professionals, all colocated in relatively stable coherent communities around large factories and manufacturing centres. Instead the working classes began to socially and geographically divide and diverge.
In the new metropolitan knowledge economy agglomerates (London being the biggest example) the workforce is dominated by highly educated workers, mostly working and living far from their place of birth, accustomed to an uncertain and ever changing career trajectory dominated by fluid team working with diverse people. These knowledge workers share a sort of generalised global middle class tolerant and liberal culture. For this community incoming migration is relatively unproblematic, the incomers that come to work in the knowledge economy mostly share a globalised culture, usually speak good English and become easily integrated into the fabric of the city. And the incomers that don’t join the knowledge economy in the city bring cheap services and interesting culture (food, music, etc).
These new knowledge economy workers are now the backbone of Labour Party membership and of progressive politics, and the Liberal/Left identity is now heavily focussed on the politics of race, gender, religion, sexuality and green issues like climate change.
Meanwhile a huge swath of the left behind population has found itself seemingly forgotten and ignored. No longer bound to the knowledge workers either socially, culturally or geographically, and no longer capable of ‘stopping the line’ (as they could do in the old Fordist economy) they are disempowered, marginalised, and are relegated to poorly paid jobs with little chance of upward mobility. For millions of people the idea that their children will be better off than they are is a pipe dream. Worse their ethnic identity is now deemed illegitimate. The rise of Scottish nationalism means that more and more people in England now identify as English rather than as British, however the response of the Left is that very idea of an English identity let alone organising around such an identity is highly illegitimate. Start any sort of club, movement, or campaign with the word English in the title and see what the response is from the Liberal/Left.
This left behind half of the population was getting by, even as they grew ever more distant and alienated from the dynamic diverse culture of the knowledge economy metropolitan centres, their wages were growing albeit slowly and they got by even as their sense of powerlessness slowly grew and politics began to drift away from them. Then two things happened. One was the Financial Crash of 2008 and the following Great Recession. This stopped wage growth in it’s tracks and the government’s austerity policy began to dismantle the very public services that the left behind communities depended on. Things were no longer getting better, they were getting worse. Secondly starting in the early 2000s a huge wave of immigration developed, largely as a result of a series of relatively unconnected changes made to the immigration control system by Labour but inextricably linked in the minds of many with the EU because when politicians were pushed about immigration they always said there was nothing they could do about because of Single Market rules. The EU was experienced by many, many people, as being the main cause of this new immigration wave. The huge wave of immigration impacted the post-Fordist communities the most. Migrants arriving in such left behind communities were far more likely to not speak English, to not socially mix, to strongly retain ‘alien’ non-English cultures, to compete for jobs and ever scarcer public services, and accept lower wages. The huge immigration flows of the last twenty years, which has seen by far the largest large-scale immigration flows in the history of the UK, combined with a perceived loss of control of borders combined to fuel rage against a system which seems impervious to the concerns of it’s citizens.
The result was ever increasing numbers of voters who were neither solely of the Right or Left but instead a frustrated mix of the two. The initial electoral expression of these marginalised voters was UKIP which was always a primarily English nationalist movement. Many surveys of UKIP voters show the same and surprising thing, that on economic questions UKIP voters were to the left of Labour voters.There seems to be widespread support for both “radical left” and “radical right” policies.
So what seems to be happening is that the old Left-Right divide has broken down in ways that surprise and perplex the old political parties. The ground beneath the old parties has begun to profoundly shift. The people have become awkward, they just won’t fit into those nice neat political pigeon holes anymore. What is happening in the UK is to a significant degree part of what is happening across the EU (and in Trump’s USA) which is a rebellion against the way things are but a rebellion that does not fit comfortably into the old political categories. Yes it is a rebellion against the economic costs of ’Neo-Liberalism’, against the insecurity of zero hours contracts and stagnant wages, so it is a rebellion that wants the government to do more. But is also a rebellion that wants the government to do more about immigration and crime. The common theme emerging here is that people want the government to do more. Whether it’s about crime and immigration or stopping profiteering and ensuring greater economic equality, the underlying theme in all of this is a desire for more action by national governments.
As UKIP grew, and as it resonated in an ever larger and more insurgent wing of the Tory Party Cameron took the fateful decision to call the referendum. This finally gave all the millions of people who feel unheard and unrepresented by the mainstream parties the chance to topple the system, to smash up the metropolitan liberal elite project. The shock of defeat led Remainers to castigate Leave voters as racist xenophobes and ‘lizard brained’ idiots (a phrase used in a New Statesman article), and just like Clinton’s ‘basket of deplorables’ all that remarks of that sort does is enrage and strengthen the Leave voters.
The abject inability of the Tories, added and abetted by all the other parties, to actually deliver Brexit has enraged half the country, and drastically deepened the sense of political alienation. It is clear that the Tories now face possible electoral oblivion at the hands of the Faragists unless they can deliver Brexit. Longer term it seems likely that the Tories need to permanently shift onto new terrain and represent a reconfigured and mostly English constituency. This means breaking with representing big business (which overwhelmingly wants to stop Brexit), creating a new populist mix of leftist and rightist policies, and purging the party. It’s a high risk strategy but any sort of Brexit fudge will mean political oblivion. It might work.
