Old loyalties torn apart

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Old loyalties torn apart

Monday, 18 November 2019 | Janet Daley

Old loyalties torn apart

Brexit has exposed the Remainers' contempt for the working classes. Who can blame them for switching sides, asks JANET DALEY

It’s certainly true — as everybody says — that Brexit has divided the nation. This is generally regarded as a sad thing: A story of friendships renounced and families locked in unforgiving discord. In truth, this apparently bitter phase in our civic life may one day come to be seen as a golden age of popular political engagement when apathy and cynicism gave way to real passion and conviction, when people in the shops and in the streets argued openly about the importance of their institutions and the integrity of those who represented them.

In other words, it has been an era when politics mattered to ordinary people and the value of a free democratic polity had never been so clear. But there is another sense in which the great Brexit question has had a positive, and possibly more long-lasting, effect on British political arrangements.

Two major opinion polls published recently showed that the Conservatives now had more support among the working class people than middle class ones. This is thunderous in its implications. Nothing like it has occurred since the 1980s when Thatcherism broke the mould of traditional party loyalties. Clearly, this is directly related to the fact that the Tories are now the party, which unambiguously advocates leaving the European Union (EU) as expeditiously as possible, which is what more working class voters than middle class ones wish for.

But to dismiss this phenomenon as a simple, momentary preference for the party that endorses leaving the EU, is to miss its real significance. This is an earthquake in the electoral landscape and almost certainly a moment of liberation for a whole swathe of the British population which once had an almost feudal loyalty to the conditions of its birth.

I struggle to find words excoriating enough for the smug, patronising interpretation — that the rejection of Brexit among the educated professional classes simply proves that “Remain” is the enlightened position, and working class Tory supporters are ignorant bigots. This seems to me a species of malign class hatred, which I never expected to see so shamelessly disseminated in this country where snobbery has been, for generations, a benign (often guilty) and largely affectionate social force.

Another tributary of the argument that working class “Leavers” are idiots who were duped by populist lies is now doing the rounds: That it was a programme of systematic Russian interference that swung the referendum result. Can anyone seriously believe this? That Russian propaganda (which was saying what exactly) persuaded voters who had enough experience, in real life, of the catastrophic decline of their own communities, to reject all the apocalyptic warnings of Project Fear and choose what they were told was economic suicide? Oh please.

What is going on here? If it isn’t just about Brexit, and there is a true re-structuring of party affiliations, what does this mean — and how did it happen? Of course, it has something to do with the peculiarly unappetising present Labour leadership but this has been anatomised to exhaustion elsewhere, so let’s leave it aside for the moment.

What must be understood by anyone who genuinely wants to learn from this phenomenon is that the working class “Leave” vote was not just about dislike of EU diktats, and it was not just about immigration. It was a quite justifiable cry of outrage at having been effectively written off by a callous and selfish (unlikely word I know, for a social coterie that thinks of itself as, above all, compassionate) metropolitan bourgeoisie. So, in a way, this is still about class but it turns the old way of thinking about which party is on your side, on its head.

In this, it is very much like the Thatcher era when a new Conservative philosophy created a completely different political identity and message: Rather than being the party of those who already had property and prosperity — and all the freedoms, choices and self-determination that those things provided — they became the party for all those who longed for them.

Where Labour’s message to working class people had been, “Stay where you are and we’ll look after you”, the Tories were saying, “You don’t have to stay in the station to which you were born. We’ll help you move on.” Paternalism went out, aspiration came in.

So resoundingly successful was this theme that it was appropriated, digested and re-marketed — in a less coherent but more endearing form — by Blairite New Labour.

But this isn’t, I hope, just a question of changing sides — of maintaining the class division, but picking a new team to champion your sectarian interests. To leave behind the long hereditary link with a political body that was once seen as the voice of your community is quite something. It opens up the possibility of more choices, more freedom to do what you believe to be in your true interest rather than being locked into limitations which can never be escaped.

It gets you past the almost superstitious belief in the inherent goodness of socialist solutions and the inevitable wickedness of those who oppose them. Whole new vistas of understanding can be opened to you.

Words like “selfish”, as I used it above, can be re-examined in a clear light: Are those middle class, highly qualified people, who are so enthusiastic about the EU, really more generous and open to the world? Or do they simply have a lot more to gain from the advantages offered to their professional and business interests by membership — rather like the chief protagonists, Tony Blair and Nick Clegg, whose global careerism knows no limits?

The immediate effects of this dramatic shift are pretty obvious: If so many working class people have got beyond their resistance to voting Conservative, then Nigel Farage is not going to have much impact on this election. But the long-term consequences could be stupendous: Millions of ordinary people, who can look at today’s arguments and the reality of their lives, and make their own judgments about what they believe.   

(Courtesy: The Telegraph)

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