Seething with anger

Since Brexit, there has been a particular theory about why people voted the way they did: that it wasn’t about immigration or racism, it was about something called ‘identity’. It was to do with people wanting to go back to an older Britain in a simpler time when we were supposedly self-sufficient. It doesn’t matter, according to this theory, if our economy suffers from leaving the EU because it was about something so much deeper than GDP. A few years ago I wrote a piece on homesickness and nostalgia (which is actually Greek for homesickness, rather than a longing for the past as in modern English) when the Anglican vicar Giles Fraser wrote a piece on it for Unherd; the modern nostalgist longs for a version of the past which often was not real, or only remembers the positive aspects of it and does not take into account why we cannot go back to it. Currently it is common to see comments under footage of the past, often street footage but also live music footage, about how much simpler or uncomplicated things were in the past, usually the 60s or 70s but sometimes the 80s; allegedly crime was low (it actually wasn’t) and we weren’t so worried about health and safety but quite often it appears that the faces were a lot whiter.

It’s no secret that Brexiteers are often very rich or funded by the very rich and these people do not want to accept that there are material reasons why people voted the way they did because they do not want to address the fact that their economic orthodoxies which have prevailed since Thatcher’s time failed the people. The turning point was Blair’s decision to jump the gun on worker migration from weaker economies, such as the countries which joined the EU in 2004, such as Poland, and admit them without restriction when other countries in the EU did not; a lot of Remainers are fond of dismissing any objection to this as racism or simplifying it down to “they’re taking our jobs”, but as I have discussed on here previously (as someone who works in one of the sectors affected by this decision), it is a lot more complicated. Brexiteers, on the other hand, refuse to entertain any economic explanation. It’s not that they’re pro-immigration — far from it — it’s that they don’t want to entertain any challenge to laissez-faire Thatcherite economics.

Yesterday I saw a long thread by the right-wing think-tank propagandist Matthew Goodwin, appealing to the “ruling class” to “save Britain” by doing ten things. Eight of these are in the thread; two of them are on his website, not paywalled as I write. It’s astonishing that he thinks that what the average British person cares about is “radical Islamism” which has hardly shown its face at all since last October or the spectacle of people “glorifying terrorism” in mostly peaceful demonstrations against the genocide in Gaza by affixing pictures of gliders to their bags, or the fact that a Tory MP resigned because he feels threatened, or that voters in Rochdale voted for George Galloway instead of a mainstream party candidate, after the most popular party there withdrew support for their own candidate. Many of us agree that the country is falling apart, but Goodwin says nothing about the most obvious facets of this. He tells us he knows young people who “now talk openly about joining the so-called ‘great retreat’, by leaving Britain altogether” and assumes that this is because of radical Islamists, rather than houses nobody but the rich can afford and lack of job prospects. He says nothing about our health or social care, about the cost of living, about house prices and rents, about schools which are physically falling down, about the often disastrous handling of Covid and the contempt our wealthy politicians showed for the rules they imposed on us all, about how we cannot export food because of customs barriers we have inflicted on ourselves through Brexit and the businesses going bankrupt as a result; nothing about councils going bankrupt up and down the country because the government has been starving them of funds, and because the things they did to raise revenue failed during the pandemic, nor about the libraries and other valuable public amenities being lost as a result; nothing about our environment, the state of our waterways, the beaches we cannot swim at because of the raw sewage being discharged by privatised water companies.

Maybe Goodwin lives in a part of the country where the river water is pure, social care is cheap and libraries are well-staffed and well-stocked. For some reason he thinks that these issues gossiped about in the Westminster village and in papers owned by the super-rich and mostly written for by the upper middle class are of more concern to everyone than the actual fabric of our society falling to pieces. It’s the ruling class that are angry that the plebs of Rochdale chose to elect someone they dislike, and that people keep demonstrating in London against an appalling display of cruelty and depravity against a civilian population they identify with in Palestine. He writes as if the election was a terrorist attack in itself, when in fact it was a quite lawful democratic vote. Many ordinary people are appalled at the ongoing savagery even if they believed that reprisals were justified in October. Not everyone shares the identification with Israel of large parts of our ruling class and media elite. (The nearest thing to terrorism going on here right now is the gang of vandals going round with knives, cutting down cameras and even traffic lights as a way of physically fighting the London Ultra Low Emission Zone, and posting their exploits on YouTube, but Goodwin has nothing to say about this group of lawless suburban white men.)

Absurdly, he claims we have a “policy of mass immigration” as if this was still the 1960s and planeloads of newcomers were arriving from the Commonwealth every week. The fact is that British people, thanks to rules introduced by the present government, find it nearly impossible to bring in spouses or other family members from overseas unless they are high earners (another reason why some British people might find they cannot live here anymore). British businesses such as Asian restaurants are finding it impossible to bring in the staff they need who have the skills necessary because British-born Asians get degrees and prefer better paid jobs. There was a high proportion of Brexit votes among British Asians, who had noticed that earlier attacks on spousal immigration happened around the same time during the last Labour government as the migrant workers started arriving from eastern Europe. It’s equally absurd to link “mass immigration” with Islamist extremism; the majority of Muslims here are British citizens who have been here for three or four generations, and those who were radicalised usually were because of racism; the same is true of the claim of ‘ghettoisation’. But this argument is not worth exploring here anyway, as there has not been a single serious violent incident in the UK since the start of the Gaza genocide (hence the reminders of things that happened in the past). It has all been peaceful protest and an election upset. But to this country’s radical Right, that’s really no difference from terrorism; the difference between violent and “non-violent extremism” is artificial, as Melanie Philips once claimed.

Goodwin’s article comes straight out of an echo chamber. The liberals and Left are often accused of only listening to each other and of being surprised at general elections that go against them because all those they follow on Twitter think the same way they do, but here we see someone completely oblivious to the difficulties normal people are facing, and seething with anger about a by-election result and a persistent protest about a horrific orgy of violence that will not stop, and would if any other country was responsible provoke calls for military action rather than a mere ceasefire. The average person is seeing the cost of living continue to rise, services being shut down, taxes in some places going through the roof to pay council debts; Goodwin wants us to be angry about brown-skinned people getting uppity rather than brown stuff filling our streams, rivers, coastline and even in some cases our streets. He knows the Tory party cannot win an election by appealing to its record, which is wretched; their alternative, rather than admitting defeat and failure, is to look around for scapegoats and distractions. His ten demands are not a programme for bringing people together but for picking fights that might be solved with repression. There may be deeper things than GDP, but people will not ignore the decline in their standard of living forever.

Possibly Related Posts:

• They weren’t protests
• Don’t mention the genocide
• So much for “war on the NIMBYs”
• Desperate Tories, shameless lies
• It’s Islamophobia, thank you