Showing posts with label England. Show all posts
Showing posts with label England. Show all posts

Sunday 16 May 2021

Love in the time of Brexit

The 2016 Brexit referendum divided Britain along class lines. Why? Two novels on Brexit, class and the dynamics of division 

Who voted for Brexit and who opposed it? Not long after the vote, Matthew Goodwin and Oliver Heath looked at the polling data in a report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “Put simply, older, white and more economically insecure people with low levels of educational attainment were consistently more likely to vote for Brexit,” they say (Brexit vote explained: poverty, low skills and lack of opportunities, August 31 2016). Other researchers agree. Leave voters did share some important traits that do not correlate directly with income or education – more on that later. Neither did lower-income people necessarily vote for Brexit, especially if they were young. Still, broadly speaking, if you were poorer and lower-skilled, you voted Leave. 

But this is the group that is  the first to suffer in any downturn , and is therefore likely to be hurt most by Brexit in the end. So why vote for it?

Researchers like Goodwin and Heath can uncover a great deal from data. But to really drill down, you  need a novelist. Several have now written novels that are, to a greater or lesser extent, a response to Brexit, and try to put it in context. I have just read two of them; I liked them both, but they don’t tell quite the same story.

First, Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut.

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Cairo Jukes is from Dudley in the West Midlands. He’s an ex-boxer in early middle age, scraping a living as part of a team of labourers digging up abandoned factories and other sites, clearing up the mess and recovering what they can that’s useful. When we meet him, he’s working in an abandoned abattoir. In his off hours he lives with his parents and his own daughter and her baby. 

Grace is a London film-maker who has worked in the Balkans and won an award. Now it’s 2016 and the EU referendum is coming. She’s making a documentary about the referendum, and wants to find out why people might vote for Brexit. She decides to film in Dudley – and meets Cairo. What follows is an ill-starred romance. In The Cut, Author Cartwright uses this encounter as a vehicle to show the gulf between those who voted for either side, and tries to show us why. This approach isn’t an accident; Cartwright was commissioned (by the Peirene Press) to write this novella as a response to the Brexit vote. 

That might make one expect the worst sort of didactic novel, the sort that Orwell warned  against in Inside the Whale. But Cartwright does not fall into that trap at all. Cairo Jukes is a working man who votes for Brexit; it would be easy for a certain type of reader to dismiss him as someone who does this simply out of resentment and ignorance, but Cartwright won’t let us get off that easily. Jukes is a nice man. He does have something to say, and it’s said subtly. There’s no racist raving against foreigners here, just someone who reckons his class has given far more than they have got in return. The industrial wasteland he digs up is a metaphor for Britain; it used everything towns like Dudley could produce and more, and moved on - and now those left behind scratch a living picking at the mess it left, feeling that they are despised and seen as stupid. In one memorable passage, Jukes ponders that people are tired - “tired of being told you were no good, tired of being told that what you believed to be true was wrong, tired of being told to stop complaining, tired of being told what to eat, what to throw away, what to do and what not to do, what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong.”

This does strike a chord – even with me (and I am quite posh). The day after the referendum there was a pic doing the rounds on social media that showed lots of supposedly delicious European food on one side, and on the other, a solitary can of baked beans. I grew up on a traditional British diet, and my mother was a wonderful cook. I found the picture offensive. Ignorant peasants, your food is shit. Your identity is shit. “The rest of the country is ashamed of us,” thinks Jukes. You want us gone in one way or the other.” Tired of being told what to eat… what was right and wrong when you were always in the wrong. Meanwhile Grace tries to understand him, and a relationship – of a sort – begins; but the gulf is too wide, and they seem doomed from the start to hurt each other.

This novella was probably written quickly, and there are some flaws. Jukes is vividly drawn and very sympathetic. Grace, the film-maker, is somehow neither; it clearly wasn’t her that Cartwright wanted to write about. She is a bit two-dimensional. And I found the end of the novella (which I won’t give away) a bit melodramatic; from the readers’ reviews, others have felt the same way. But I think Cartwright meant it to represent the pain inflicted on two people who have misunderstood each other – as they do, tragically, at the end. Without revealing the plot, something happens to make Jukes feel unwanted and disposable, and his reaction leads to tragedy for both him and Grace. It is a little over the top, but it is an apt metaphor for the mutual self-destruction that has driven Brexit. And in general, The Cut packs a punch. It’s not perfect, but I wouldn’t have missed it.

*

The Cut is an intense story, seen mainly through the eyes of one person on one side of the divide. Chris Beckett’s Two Tribes is shot with a wider lens, and from both sides. But the result is just as unsettling. 

Beckett is a science-fiction writer, and a successful one (his 2012 novel Dark Eden, in particular, was very well received and won the Arthur C. Clarke award). Two Tribes may be a bit of a departure for him. There’s a sci-fi angle, but this is a book about the present. From other readers’ reviews of Two Tribes, it looks like it didn’t work for some of his readers, but it worked very well for me.

The book has two main characters. Harry’s a middle-aged architect getting over the death of a child, followed by a divorce. We meet him first on his way to a weekend with wealthy friends in their Suffolk cottage. Michelle has also lost a child. She is an attractive Brexit-voting hairdresser from a working-class background who lives in the small Norfolk town of Breckham. Harry listens to his fashionable friends raving about the stupidity of Brexit. He agrees with them, but deep down their anger and their certainties are beginning to grate on him. He starts feeling curious about the other side. Then one day his car breaks down. In Breckham.

Two Tribes is, amongst other things, a love story, and I did get quite invested in Michelle and Harry and wanted things to work out for them. (This isn’t the place to say if they do.) But what Beckett really seems to want is to show us the divisions in English society and where they could lead. He does this in part by showing us the relationship between Harry and Michelle, their miscommunications and there struggle to relate. But whereas The Cut is very focused on its main character, Two Tribes has multiple viewpoints. There’s a wealthy retired Army officer on the outskirts of Breckham who is trying to recruit a right-wing militia, and you see exactly how he does it by playing on working-class frustrations and resentments. Meanwhile one of Harry’s fashionable friends has a daughter who lectures at LSE and argues that there might now be a need for a “guided democracy”. The so-called liberals lap it up. 

In fact I got the impression Beckett had equal sympathy for both tribes; at any rate, he doesn’t take sides. He seems more concerned with what all this could mean for the future. To that end, he’s used the plot device of a researcher in the 23rd century, who is reading Harry and Michelle’s respective diaries and filling in the blanks to make a narrative. It’s a bit artificial compared with the present-day bits, which are immediate and resonant. I did wonder if Beckett should just have written a novel set in the here and now. Still, this device does let him tell us what happened in England in the years that followed, with a picture of division then conflict – and cataclysmic climate change, which no-one prevented as they were too busy fighting teach other. 

Besides, the book’s well-paced and the characters are very alive. Harry’s the hero if there is one, but he’s very real; he is tactless with Michelle, introducing her to people who clearly make her uncomfortable. He also seems to have an almost anthropological interest in her, as if she came from an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon basin. The anti-Brexit crowd preach liberalism and tolerance but this doesn’t seem to extend to Brexit voters – yet they are too self-satisfied to see the paradox; Beckett has quite a lot of fun with this. (Cartwright, in The Cut, sees it too. As Cairo Jukes thinks: “It’ll end in camps, it’ll end in walls, you watch, and it won’t be my people who build them, Grace, it’ll be yours. It’s already happening, in your well-meaning ways.") 

*

Meanwhile Beckett’s fascist old officer gets guest speakers to talk to his militia, and it is chilling how the recruits’ psychology is manipulated. It is also very believable. And it is important, because Brexit wasn’t solely – or even, in my view, mainly – about economics. To be sure, Cairo Jukes comes from a class that has been used then abandoned, and he sees it. But Michelle’s different; she isn’t wealthy, but she runs a business of her own (she’s a hairdresser) and clearly has her life together. If you’re on the radical left, it’s tempting to see the Brexit vote as an uprising of the poor. That is part of it, but the whole truth is messier. 

As I said at the beginning, voting Leave correlates with limited income and education. A number of studies have confirmed this. In their report for the Rowntree Foundation,  Goodwin and Heath also do so. But they also note that younger voters tended to vote Remain, even if they were not wealthy. And they add that the disadvantaged voters who did vote for Brexit “are also united by values that encourage support for more socially conservative, authoritarian and nativist responses. ...Over three-quarters of Leave voters feel disillusioned with politicians; two-thirds support the death penalty; and well over half feel very strongly English.” The “nativist” bit matters here. Veteran politician and pollster Lord Ashcroft has found something similar. In a survey on referendum day itself in 2016, he found that of those who described themselves as  more English than British, 66% voted Leave. Of those who said they were English not British, 79% voted leave (A reminder of how Britain voted in the EU referendum – and why, March 15 2019).  

One suspects many people who would have identified as British 40 years ago now sense that people in the other home nations are now less likely to do so; so they don’t either, and identify as English instead. At the same time, however, they also sense that it is somehow unfashionable to be English, that foreigners prefer the Scots, Welsh and Irish. The picture I described earlier, with its implication that British food is crap, is an example of this sort of prejudice, and resentment at this may also have played a part. So it seems that part of what drove Brexit was a weakened and offended sense of identity amongst the English. I know of no data that proves that. But if true, it would explain the correlation found by Ashcroft and, I suspect, by others. 

This is what resonated with me when reading the passages in Two Tribes in which Beckett describes his ghastly old fascist, his “recruits” and the guest speakers that manipulate their emotions. I found myself thinking of Eric Hofer’s The True Believer, and the historian Peter Fritzche’s Germans into Nazis – both books that show, albeit in very different ways, how populists, including Fascists, prey on those who feel a need for unity and belonging. I also found myself thinking of academic Jan-Werner Müller’s definition of populism, as laid out in What is Populism? I wrote about that book at the time it was published in 2016 (here). But in essence, a populist identifies with “the people” but either does not define them, or does so in a way that “others” many of those around them, rather as Hitler did with Jews. So if you’re not in the core group of “the people”, you’re out of luck. It’s striking that, according to Ashcroft, the the vast majority of Asian and black voters went with Remain. For what it is worth,  anecdotal evidence suggests that ethnic minorities can identify as British but find it harder to identify as English, and if they do, they do not always feel that assertion is accepted. If Brexit is about English nationalism, the future doesn’t look great for them. 

It’s a dodgy cocktail. A people looking for an identity; a deeply flawed cause, Brexit, in which they find it; and a growing exclusion of all those who, for whatever reason, don’t sign up or are not invited. Meanwhile those who can see the disaster unfolding do not really understand how it has come about, and lack the skills and the grace to prevent it. Maybe Beckett is right, and nastier things than Brexit might now be on their way. In fact Two Tribes feels prescient. As for The Cut, it is a warm and humane picture of a decent man with nothing to lose. Polling data can tell you a lot, but now and then a novelist hits the nail right on the head.



Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

Follow Mike on Twitter and Facebook.



Monday 13 June 2016

Thinking of voting Leave? I'd have done, once

A post for Brits: Are you thinking of voting to leave the EU? For years I wanted a chance to do the same. But I have been thinking hard

As I write this (on June 12), the latest polls show the voters swinging backwards and forwards on Brexit.  The BBC quotes a poll from June 10 that puts Brexiteers at 55%. Other polls disagree but right now it looks like Leave.

If anyone wants to know why so many Brits are itching to get out of the EU, they needn’t bother looking at the spurious tripe and specious data shoved out by the Remain and Leave campaigns. No-one believes any of it. The real reason Brexit has so much support can be gleaned from a statement made by actress Emma Thompson at the Berlin Film Festival back in February.  She was quoted in The Guardian as saying that Britain was “a tiny little cloud-bolted, rainy corner of sort-of Europe, a cake-filled misery-laden grey old island”, that she “just felt European”. These are the elite attitudes that are driving British, and especially English, votes into the Brexit camp, and reading that was nearly enough to make me vote “Leave” as well. Many voters wish the liberal middle class would just take themselves off to Tuscany, then, if that’s where they’d rather be. It’s part of the same “culture wars” that are leading voters towards Trump in the US.

Harold Wilson, instigator of the 1975 referendum (Vivienne)
But this is dangerous.  As Owen Jones said in a typically intelligent piece, also in The Guardian, on June 10: “When presented with a vote on the status quo, it is no surprise that those with the least stake in it vote to abandon it... Threats of economic Armageddon resonate little with people living in communities that feel ignored, marginalised and belittled.”  The Leave campaign, says Jones, is much the same as Trump’s, “powerful vested interests ...masquerading as the praetorian guard of an anti-establishment insurgency.” He is so right. If some of the polls are to be believed, on June 23 millions of Brits will traipse into polling booths to vote against their own interests. In voting against their perceived enemies in the ‘liberal’ elite, people will be voting for their real enemies. And reading statements like Emma Thompson’s one understands, with horrible clarity, how this has happened.

I voted to stay in Europe in 1975. Later I regretted it. For years I wanted a chance to vote the other way. But I shan’t. I am voting to stay in the EU, and I think my fellow-Brits should too. Some will have to swallow some bile to do so. This post explains why I think they should.

Let’s start with the last referendum, 42 years ago.

Another country
The past is another country and in 1975, Britain certainly was. I worked in a bookshop and when I prepared an invoice, I did it on an ancient Remington manual typewriter, keeping carbons for the file. When I sold a book, I handwrote the amount on a paper till roll; the till itself was made of wood and the tray slid out with a pleasant kerching. Much of the country’s heat and light was still from coal – even the trains had run on it less than 10 years before, and the stations were blackened by smoke.  A long coal strike in early 1974, combined with the 1973 oil crisis, had damaged the economy badly. Inflation was, by modern standards, very high, and in June, the month of the referendum, it went over 26%.  I remember that in early 1975 my wages were raised from £845 a year to £1,495, to reflect this. It was not unusual.

Yet if the country was different, the politics of the referendum were oddly similar. Labour had returned to power in February 1974 in the wake of the miners’ strike, and had pledged to renegotiate the terms under which Britain had entered the European Economic Community the year before. This was popular, as the previous Tory government had broken a 1970 promise to hold a referendum before entry. Labour’s renegotiation did not, as I recall, change the terms that much, but Prime Minister Harold Wilson advocated a Yes (remain) vote; at the same time, however, he allowed members of his government to campaign on either side, to prevent a disastrous split in his party. Does this sound familiar?

But the quality of the debate was much higher. There are no giants like Barbara Castle and Denis Healey around today. And some of the issues, too, were different. Many Leave voters were incensed by the way we seemed to have turned our back on the Commonwealth by joining Europe; we had, they said, kicked our allies in teeth for the sake of our enemies. The war in Europe had ended barely 30 years earlier; it was not yet really history, and feelings still ran high. There was also a huge economic risk in the reduction of tariff barriers with Europe. Britain was still a major industrial power, but was slipping badly; its goods were declining in quality. French and German cars, for example, were better assembled – British ones could be maddeningly unreliable. Some wondered if British industry would survive the competition. It was a pertinent point; over the course of 1975, unemployment rose from 3.3% to 5.1%.

I was aware of this and especially of the Commonwealth dimension, and I seem to remember I thought quite hard, or as hard as I ever did back then (I was 18). But in the end I voted to stay in the EEC, at least partly because I felt that most European countries were more modern and democratic, and would be a good influence on us.

A grandiose dream?
It was a long time before I changed my mind. I can remember being angered when all our petrol pumps had to be converted to litres. British people didn’t use these to measure fuel consumption, and still don’t, so this was pointless (though it would likely not happen now).  Then I started to feel very uneasy after Maastricht, which seemed to presage a European state. Such a superstate would have been an artificial creation that would eventually have cracked apart, almost certainly with violence. It was a grandiose and vainglorious notion dreamed up by a  rootless elite who felt more comfortable with each other than with their own people.

The Berlaymont - grandiose? (Anderson Pecorone)
And yet the driving dream behind the EU – peace and stability in Europe, after centuries of war – was always a noble one; something that many in the UK never really understood. To many Brits, Maastricht was as much an attempt to destroy us as 1940 had been.  Many have seen the EU as little more than a French plot against Britain. I never approved of “ever-closer union”. But I never saw it as the evil plot that many of my parents’ generation did. So I felt torn about Europe.

What fixed my opinions was two and a half years in Brussels. I went there as a long-term consultant on an EU-funded programme for technical assistance to the former Soviet Union. This programme did some good things but pushed an economic model that most Russians probably did not want. I also did not feel comfortable in Brussels. The city itself is pleasant enough, and Belgium in general deserves a better press. Yet I always sensed an attitude to foreigners; it was not quite hostility, more a quiet non-acceptance.  Also, it rained a lot. And the EU establishment depressed me – the bureaucrats detached from civil and diplomatic services who saw Brussels as a step up, or in some cases as a refuge; the ‘stagiaires’, or interns, screaming acronyms at each other in noisy pubs; the huge self-important buildings, especially the Berlaymont, then wrapped in sheeting for asbestos removal – grandiosity again; and the endless paperwork before anything got done.  Then in 2001 I got a chance to move to Rome, as a consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. I jumped at it, and will never forget emerging into the bright Roman sunshine and giving thanks. For the next decade I remained a firm Brexiteer.

I’m not any more. For one thing, Cameron’s renegotiation exempted the UK from “ever-closer union” – but this was not, in truth, a big concession; the European super-state has been dead in the water for some time. No-one ever really wanted it, and the Euro crises of recent years, culminating in the bitter humiliation of Greece, have killed it off for good. But there are several other reasons for my re-think.

Movement of people
The first reason why I’ve changed my mind is the enormous exchange of population between Britain and the rest of the EU. It can’t be reversed. According to the Office for National Statistics, there are nearly 800,000 people of Polish descent in Britain now (not all because of the EU; in the early 1950s there were already some 150,000, most of whom had arrived during or after the war). There are also hundreds of thousands of French nationals in England – the French think it is up to 400,000, mostly in London. According to the 2011 Census, there were about 2.68 million people in Britain who had been born elsewhere in the EU. Meanwhile about 1.3 million UK nationals live elsewhere in the EU – about half in Spain, to which many retire.

Even if free movement is abrogated completely, it is inconceivable that all these people could or should be repatriated; it would involve forced mass migrations last seen in Europe in 1945-46 (and those were not something one would wish to repeat). Moreover our economy would collapse. So the immigration argument for Brexit holds little water; yes, we have had a huge net inward migration from the EU, but those people aren’t going anywhere. They will have to be given residence permits. It is not even clear that the UK could prevent further free movement, as it might be a condition of continued access to the EU single market.  Attempting to restrict it could also threaten the Irish peace process, a threat that Ireland does not deserve – and a reminder that this referendum isn’t just about us.

There is one immigration-related argument with which I have some sympathy. People are understandably unimpressed that Romanians and Bulgars with no links to Britain can move there, whereas an architect in Brisbane or a database designer in Hyderabad cannot, even if they have family in Britain. But Brexit would not change this. First, Australia and India do not permit free movement of UK citizens, and it’s unlikely the UK would make a non-reciprocal deal. Second, as stated above, to keep access to EU markets we’ll need to accept free movement to some extent. In that context, no UK government is likely to permit freer entry of Commonwealth citizens as well. In any case, the right-wingers who will be in charge after Brexit are unlikely to be sympathetic to any non-white immigration. More family members from the subcontinent? Forget it.

So much for immigration. It is something many British people care about deeply, having seen their communities, their high streets and their workplaces change with lightning speed, and without their consent. But Brexit will do little to change any of this.

European security
Meanwhile, a grave argument against Brexit is security and stability. The Leave camp insists that this is a matter for NATO, not the EU, and that it is therefore irrelevant. It is not.

First, NATO has historically been driven by the US, and today it is at least as interested in Asia. As I write this, the State Department’s attention is probably more on the Spratly Islands than Ukraine. A British exit will send a dangerous message to Moscow.

Franco with his Prime Minister shortly before his death in 1975
This will be even more dangerous if Britain’s departure leads to an unravelling of the EU in general, as some (including, it is said, Angela Merkel) believe it might. Besides exposing Europe to external threats, it could reverse the peace within Europe that it has enjoyed for most of my lifetime. Not because France and Germany would be at each other’s throats (they wouldn’t), but because the EU has been the driver for a wholesale growth in democracy in Europe. It is easy to forget that in 1975, Spain was still under the dictatorship of General Franco – he was to die that November – and Greece and Portugal had thrown off authoritarian regimes only the previous year.  The prospect of EU membership was an incentive for these countries to adopt democratic regimes and they have retained them. Even more important, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989-91 left a vacuum that could easily have been filled by the type of semi-fascist governments that dominated the region before 1939. Again, the prospect of EU membership came, for many in the east, to symbolise the drive for modernity and an escape from the past.

Do we wish to reverse that? The far right has reappeared in Europe and the EU is a bulwark against it. Again, it is a reminder of something that many in Britain either forget, or willfully ignore: This referendum is not just about us.

A democratic deficit?
We also need to stop believing that leaving the EU will be some sort of liberation from an oppressive bureaucracy. Let’s start with the supposed democratic deficit in Brussels.

The Fall of the Wall: An EU peace in Eastern Europe? (Lear 21)
To be sure, the European Commission is not properly elected and sometimes seems unaccountable. But in theory, at least, its members must be approved by the European Parliament. Moreover, while the Parliament can’t dismiss individual Commissioners once they’re in office, it can dismiss the Commission as a whole. So when one Commissioner, Édith Cresson, refused to resign in January 1999 following a corruption scandal, the Parliament threatened to throw out the entire Commission (which resigned en masse before that could happen).  

The European Parliament is properly elected under a proportional system. The Westminster Parliament is not. The current UK government has the votes of only 24% of the electorate – and only about 37% of the votes actually cast. “Out” voters may want to ponder the fact that UKIP got one Westminster seat for its 3.9 million votes, while the Tories got a seat for every 44,000 votes and Labour one seat per 34,000 votes. Worse, the government drawn from this “elected” parliament has complete authority; as long as it retains a majority, it will not be dismissed, and is virtually unaccountable. Moreover it can do pretty much what it likes; there is an unelected Lords that can delay but not prevent its legislation, and a Head of State who by convention does neither. Britain is, in fact, marginal for being called a democracy, and anyone wishing to address the “democratic deficit” had best start at home.

An independent, influential UK?
The last serious argument against Brexit, for me, is the global dimension.The Brexit camp would have you believe that, out of Europe, Britain could pick up its pre-EU threads and continue to influence world events at the top table. This is deluded.

First, the EU as a bloc is a bigger and more important entity than the UK. Assuming it survives Brexit, the great powers will talk to it or to its prime mover, Germany – not to us. Ah, the Leave campaign will say, but we’re still the world’s fifth largest economy, a nuclear power and a member of the UN Security Council. They’ll talk to us as well.

Let’s examine this.

One of the first things that will happen if Britain votes “Leave” is that the Scottish Nationalists will attempt to hold a new independence referendum. This won’t automatically happen, as the SNP lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament in May 2016. However, it is only two seats short, and if any one of the other parties were to support it in this matter, it could prevail. Even if they did not do so, it is not hard to imagine one or two renegades from the other parties supporting the motion. The 2014 vote against independence, though clear, was not a landslide. A Leave vote in the UK as a whole would probably make many Scots think again – especially if, as seems likely, Scotland votes Remain.

There would be two consequences. First, the UK would be diminished. Only about 10% of the population would be lost, but the permanence of the UK as an entity would be cast into doubt. Second, the UK nuclear deterrent would have to leave its current base at Faslane. This would raise the cost of renewing Trident, already put at about £100 billion (though this is a lifetime cost; the initial outlay would be smaller). Given the economic uncertainty that would follow Brexit, the government of the truncated UK would have to think hard about this – and about the political cost of imposing a nuclear submarine base on some new location, possibly Plymouth.

A smaller country, without a nuclear deterrent. The case for retaining our permanent seat on the UN Security Council, already shaky, might now be untenable – especially as other member states could argue that the UK was no longer the country to which the seat was allocated in 1945 (a thin argument, but it will be used). Out of Europe. Off the Security Council. No longer of significance in Washington. Let us hope Argentina does not then invade the Falklands, for there will be few to support us if they do.

What are we left with, after Brexit? At home, we will have an inbuilt Conservative majority at Westminster. It isn’t hard to see why right-wing interests are so keen on Brexit. Boris Johnson or (more likely) Michael Gove would become Prime Minister, and the loss of the Scottish electorate and the rigged electoral system will keep him there. Social welfare will come to an end and the NHS will be put out to tender. 

Millions of ordinary English voters, affronted by remarks such as Emma Thompson’s, will march into the booths on the 23rd and mark the cross for Leave, thinking they are voting against the likes of her. But they won’t be. They will be voting for their real enemies. Meanwhile, a rump country, diminished in the world, will watch its remaining influence slip away and realize, too late, that the Leave vote has brought the long post-imperial twilight to an end.

This piece is also on the VoxEurop site, here.

Follow Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19), on Facebook or on Goodreads


was published in December 2016 and is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or through bookshops
(ISBN  978-0-9978815-0-9, ebook; ISBN 978-0-9978815-1-6, paperback)





Sunday 1 May 2016

The English Defence League. Served hot and cold


The English Defence League. Who are they? What are they defending? Are they “terrible people”, as David Cameron said? And whatever they are, what do they tell us about modern England? Two new books try to tell us – in very different ways

It’s a sunny spring day in 2011 and Joel Busher is at an English Defence League demonstration in Chadwell Heath, Essex. The activists meet in a pub, where beer is drunk. When they’re told to form up, a lot of them slip to the toilet first. As they march in protest at the building of a Muslim community centre, there’s singing and chanting. An Asian man gets yelled at. Someone hands out leaflets while wearing a pig’s-head mask.  Then, says Busher: “...small groups of women from black and minority ethnic communities looked on with concern etched on their faces, and a family of Asian origin peered nervously from behind net curtains as a group of young EDL activists pointed and chanted at them until a local EDL organiser intervened: ‘No! No! Stop! They’re Sikhs! We like Sikhs!’”

Banner at demo in Newcastle, May 2010 (Gavin Lynn/Creative Commons)
Do they? Was there something about the EDL that no-one quite spotted at the time?

The EDL came to prominence from 2009 onwards, chiefly as a group demonstrating against what they saw as creeping Islamicisation. It wasn’t an attractive picture, conjuring up images of shaven-headed thugs in blouson jackets, waving cans of Special Brew and yelling threats. Was that the reality? And if so, was it the whole reality? Or was there something more complex going on? And if so, what does it tell us about modern Britain (and perhaps Europe)?  

Busher wasn’t a demonstrator. He was, and is, a researcher. I happen to know him; we did our PhDs together at UEA in Norwich in the 2000s. At that time, he was working on community-based approaches to HIV in Namibia. After that, he says, “I needed a job.” He found himself working in the civil service looking at post-conflict stabilization programmes and radical protest movements. This led him back into academia (in fact, to Coventry University), where he works on the dynamics of contemporary anti-minority activism – not just in Britain; he has also been working with colleagues in South Africa.

To try to understand the EDL, Busher spent much of 2011 and part of 2012 attending EDL meetings and demonstrations, interviewing activists and joining them on social media. The Making of Anti-Muslim Protest: Grassroots Activism in the English Defence League sets out to understand who the EDL were, how their members came into the movement and how they interacted with each other once there. The book isn’t journalism. Anyone reading this for a “frank exposé” with lots of racist violence will be disappointed. So will anyone seeking to have their prejudices confirmed about the white working class. This is a serious research work, and is shrewd and illuminating.

Hsiao-Hung Pai, however, is a journalist. Her own new book, Angry White People: Coming Face-to-Face with the British Far Right was published a few weeks after Busher’s. It is very different. And according to columnist Rodd Liddle, it’s crap. Early in 2016 he penned a piece in the Spectator titled: What makes the white working class angry? Twits like Hsiao-Hung Pai.

Pai, who sometimes writes for The Guardian, had been in Luton and elsewhere talking to members of the anti-Muslim English Defence League (EDL), trying to find out what had driven them to towards this controversial group – why, in fact, they were ‘angry’. Her efforts did not impress Liddle, who decided that Pai was the worst kind of ‘liberal’ – anti-English, patronising, with a closed mind. The reason why white working people were angry, he said, was because of people like Pai: “bone-headed, arrogant, absolutist liberals who insist to them — contrary to the evidence — that their fears are utterly baseless and should not be taken seriously.” 

I’ve got some serious concerns of my own about Angry White People, of which more below. But Pai is not a “bone-headed, arrogant, absolutist liberal”, and in general this is a much better book than Liddle would have you believe. It is not unbiased; this isn’t a dispassionate approach like Busher’s.  However,  it raises different and equally important questions. Between them these two books should have any thoughtful reader pondering England’s future, not happily.

*

Busher is a sociologist, and approached his work with an academic framework. Two pillars of this seem to be of special importance. The first was to look at the EDL in terms of ‘world-building’. The latter is a concept developed by American researcher Deborah Gould in a much-praised 2009 work on AIDS activism in the US. Crudely stated, it analyses how activists come together behind a single, possibly quite narrow, cause, and together proceed to construct a broader worldview and social networks, the one reinforcing the other. This concept is of great interest in looking at how social movements in general construct themselves.

But it is the second concept that I found of special interest. This is the way Busher has teased out why his interviewees became involved in the EDL. He could of course just have asked them, and sometimes did.  But motives, he says, “are often furnished ‘after the act’. ...in groups such as the EDL, justifying their participation becomes part of their day-to-day lives [and this] makes it particularly difficult to explore ... motivations post hoc.” He adds later that “when asked directly about why they had become involved in the EDL, they usually reeled off various lengthy commentaries about what they saw as the cultural and security threats posed to their country, culture or way of life ...or about how ‘ordinary English people’ were being ignored by the political elite. ...However, once I started asking activists to narrate their journeys into the EDL step by step, a more complex picture began to emerge.”

Thus he interviews Terry, who “was a staunch anti-royalist, loved and played blues music, and often dipped into Marxist economic and social theories when explaining his arguments about the global diffusion and threat of Islam. ...He had been involved in revolutionary socialist politics during his early adult life – something he had fallen into when, after going to listen to Tony Benn speaking at Brixton Town Hall.” Busher brackets Terry with a whole group that had “swerved” across to the EDL, having often been involved with anti-fascist and anti-racist groups (involvements that they used to refute suggestions that they and the EDL were racist or fascist). Busher thinks that about 5% of the EDL activists were of this type. He adds that another 25-30% were people who had been involved in some other form of social activism, such as support to veterans’ charities, but also animal welfare groups or union activism, which seem like less likely precursors to EDL activity.

Busher is struck that there is a more complex picture than one might suppose. Some people even tell him they have joined the EDL because they can thus oppose militant Islam without getting mixed up with right-wing thugs. (It should be said that, since Busher did his research, links between the EDL and the conventional far right have been strengthened.) Also, the EDL for a long time had a Jewish group, not something one associates with fascists. Busher records an especially bizarre occasion when EDL leader Tommy Robinson was supposed not to attend a demonstration as he was subject to a banning order. He attended anyway, disguised as a rabbi.

*

Hsiao-Hung Pai paints a less nuanced picture.

Pai was born in Taiwan but moved to England in 1991, in her early 20s. She has written several books, including Chinese Whispers: The True Story Behind Britain's Hidden Army of Labour (2012) and Invisible: Britain's Migrant Sex Workers (2013), working undercover in order to research both. This must have taken some quite serious balls. She began her research for Angry White People in Luton, where the EDL emerged in 2009 as a response to a demonstration there by an Islamic organization led by preacher Anjem Choudary, who wishes to see Shari’a law in the UK. The demonstration was aimed at the Royal Anglian Regiment’s homecoming parade after service in Helmand Province. Choudary’s demonstration gave offence to many; locally, a number of football supporters formed the United Peoples of Luton, which developed into the EDL.

Pai meets Choudary, which infuriates Liddle. In fact, she seems to meet him only briefly; she records that he is polite and beyond that says little. It’s the angry white people she wants to talk to. Her main contact seems to have been Darren, a relative of EDL organizers Tommy Robinson and Kevin Carroll. Darren was once involved in the EDL; he regrets it. Pai devotes a lot of space to tracing Darren’s upbringing, his social milieu and how he was led (mainly via football) into the EDL. She does it well, and was clearly listening. She also tries to talk to white people on the Luton estates and understand their views. Here she’s only partially successful; not everyone really wants to talk. But bit by bit she starts to build up a picture of them.  They seem to her to be bitterly disadvantaged, their traditional jobs at the Vauxhall plant gone; what work there is to be had, they tell her, is being funnelled to outsiders. They are wary of other communities (including Muslims), who they say do not “integrate”.

From this she constructs her thesis: that white working-class people have been fooled into blaming migrants and Muslims for their troubles instead of the real culprits, the Tories and the rich. This argument might not impress Liddle, but I think she puts it well. As Benjamin Zephaniah says in his introduction to Angry White People: “I have to agree  ...that the political elite has neglected the white working class. ...[T]hey live in terrible housing conditions, their traditional industries have been destroyed,  ...and governments of all colours have been ignoring their cries for help for decades.”  In London, Pai talks to a Jewish Cockney who tells her, “If you look around here, you’ll see everyone’s angry ... These days, a lot of white people around here ... support  ...groups like the EDL ...because they direct their anger the wrong way.” He is a hospital porter and says that if he loses his job he’s on benefits but if his bosses do, they’ll get a massive payout.  Pai’s view (and Zephaniah’s) is that struggling working people of all backgrounds, including white ones, need to confront their real enemies, not each other. I think she’s right.

However, Pai weakens her case with some sloppy research and quotation. She says that 83 percent of Muslims are “proud to be British” and that 77 percent of Muslims identify strongly with Britain while only 50 percent of the wider population do. She says these figures come from “a research paper entitled Understanding Society, by the University of Essex”. Actually Understanding Society is not a paper but a large research programme with multiple outputs (including papers) over a period of years, and I can’t trace this one. That doesn’t mean the figures are wrong. But since Angry White People was published in early 2016, a Channel 4 poll has appeared that is said to demonstrate that Muslims do not feel they belong in Britain, and do not share its values. This poll has been bitterly refuted by some, possibly with good reason. We are on contested ground, and Pai should have quoted her source properly. She also gives figures for the different types and numbers of Roma/Traveller people in Britain, but does not say where she got them – and they appear to be way out.

More seriously, Pai seems to have gone into her research already armed with a basic thesis; the rich are dividing us; we must forget race and religion, and act together. As I have said, I agree with this.  But it’s only part of the picture, and Pai doesn’t talk about the other part: the way the right (including the “moderate” right) exploits an unsure sense of identity.

Pai talks to a single mother on a Luton estate who tells her that she has no problem with her Muslim neighbours, and isn’t an EDL supporter. But she adds that since a mosque and school were recently built, “there’s been many more Turkish people ...and Pakistani people around here. Also, there’s quite a few Polish people coming in ...I don’t know any of them. Each group is separate from each other.” A chip-shop owner, himself originally from Cyprus, tells Pai that the Muslims don’t want to integrate (others echo this message). Pai asks him how they can be expected to, when the EDL wants to close down mosques. She does not record his reply. Neither does she ask him how he would like them to integrate. Could it be that this man wants to know these people better? In Hampshire, Pai meets a middle-aged man who has had long stretches of unemployment. Recently he has managed to get some agency work. “When I went into the common room to have my sandwich, not a word of English was being spoken in there ...They were all Polish.” He does not feel intimidated, but does feel uncomfortable, and goes to eat somewhere else.

None of these people tell Pai that they dislike Muslims, or Poles. What they hate is feeling like strangers in their own land. But she does not get to grips with this. In fact, she calls one of her chapters “Defending the imaginary nation”, the implication being that there isn’t, in her view, an English identity. At one point she challenges former EDL leader Tommy Robinson to define it. He doesn’t do it well – but would a German or a French person do any better with theirs?

Does Pai simply not like the English? After all, many English-born middle-class liberals don’t, despising the food and weather and wishing they were Italian. But they are just class snobs. Pai, I think, is someone more interesting, and more honest. Towards the end of the book she says she is uncomfortable with having a Chinese ‘identity’, not least because of what she has seen of Chinese treatment of the Uighurs. My guess is that Pai’s intellectual convictions simply reject the concept of nationality. This is an honourable position. But it may be not be helpful. Globalization, migration and refugee movements have reduced people’s feeling of being “at home” in their own countries, and brought identity politics to life across Europe. The last time they were this strong was after the dislocation of 1919, and it did not end well.
*

For his part, Busher’s findings suggest a sentimental attachment to English identity that is as important to some activists as any form of anti-Muslim bigotry.  Thus one older activist described having had an interest in English heritage and local history and was one of several who, says Busher, wanted  “to claim and celebrate [their] national identity.”  The perception that this English identity is patronised or denigrated by a liberal establishment seems to be key to the growth of the new right. One suspects that these are feelings that are often not articulated by the majority, or are usually expressed through (for example) a love of classic Jaguars or steam trains. When they do achieve political expression, it can be negative.

Leicester, May 2012 (Matt Neale/Creative Commons)
This does not mean that the EDL are a bunch of Trots and steam enthusiasts. Busher did his fieldwork mainly in the south of England and is aware that activists in the north would have been different. He is also clear that, even in the south, many EDL activists had come in through their association with football hooliganism. (This is traced in more detail in Angry White People.)  Busher thinks about 30-40% of EDL activists, including their leadership at the beginning, came from the football violence scene. It may also be that the nastier members of the movement avoided him. He did sometimes see the shaven-headed thugs on demonstrations.

Neither does Busher evade the fact that there was a certain casual bigotry about some members of the EDL. He describes, for example, heading home from a march with a bunch of demonstrators. “We pulled into a pub/truck stop, the activists all clad in their EDL hoodies, only to find that it was run by a Muslim family. There was much debate ...One activist opined that he preferred not to [eat] because he suspected that they would spit in the food, another argued that people shouldn’t buy food from them because it was ‘like giving money to the enemy’, but most people, keen to ...soak up the alcohol, ignored them both and got stuck into [the] burgers.”  Busher is also frank about some of the prejudices of some of the EDL members and their effect on him: “Some activists said and did things that I found deeply unpleasant and sometimes disturbing – miming shooting at Muslim women, slipping into racist caricatures about ‘muzz-rats’, chanting defamatory slogans about Allah and so on and so forth,” he says. Yet he was able to put aside his own concern and, by listening, unravel the roots of EDL activism in a remarkable way – not least because he formed relationships with some activists that were at least cordial, even if he did not share their views. (He tells me that funding bodies were skeptical about his research because it would be “dangerous”, and it would be hard to meet EDL activists. In fact, he says, he found it quite easy.)

Pai doesn’t seem to have been as good at this, and although she is clearly not the snotty liberal Liddle thinks she is, I do sometimes sense prejudice. At one point she attempts to meet a possible EDL sympathiser, but he cancels by text – and she reproduces the text and all its spelling mistakes. This is pointless unless she wants to tell us what an ignorant git he is. When one (rather weird) activist tells her he thinks it’s “illegal to be English”, she writes “I couldn’t help sneering at the idea”. I hope not. If you really want to know how people think and feel, you do not sneer at them. Ever.  I also wondered if she (and other writers and researchers) should zero in on the white working class quite so much. At one point, she comments that Tommy Robinson sounds more Daily Mail than traditional far-right. Indeed. If she wants to meet hardcore bigots, she’ll find as many in suburban golf clubs and saloon bars as she will in working-class Luton. Is English racism really the preserve of the working class, or are they just a handy target for middle-class liberals?

Busher does think they are an easy target. “I keep getting invited to talk on panels etc. about the white working-class, but a lot of these anxieties are shared across classes, and I think there’s an element of demonization going on,” he said when I spoke to him recently. (He was not reacting to Pai’s book, which he had then not yet read.) He cites Owen Jones’s 2011 book Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class, in which Jones singles out class hatred as an acceptable form of prejudice amongst “liberals” who would never dare express racism or sexism but seem to think it’s OK to despise members of their own society on class grounds.

Is Pai guilty of this? Rod Liddle clearly thinks so. As I have said, I think Pai is more interesting and honest than that. But she does seem to link right-wing views with class and stupidity too easily, and too simply. In so doing, she risks underestimating the link between racism and mainstream political and media discourse. A very interesting area that Busher considers is the use of social media and how activists swap links and news on (say) Facebook. When an activist says that they are “doing their research”, they are looking at a variety of sources that may include nasty right-wing militant sites or blogs, but also include mainstream media – papers like the Daily Mail, to be sure, but also relatively radical writers (such as Christopher Hitchens) who have attacked what they see as Islamofascism. Busher thinks it is a mistake to see the mainstream media discourse as irrelevant to anti-Muslim prejudice. This is not about white working people. It’s about everybody.

*

There is one area to which both writers pay too little attention. This is the democratic deficit in modern Britain (and especially modern England).  Pai is aware of it; she quotes someone as saying “elections don’t do nothing for you” and quotes other writers as saying that many blue-collar voters have been left behind as political parties chase middle-class swing votes. Yet she mentions all this only in passing. In fact, it’s crucial in Britain, where the skewed electoral system means that the current government has an absolute majority with only 24 percent of the electorate’s votes. Is it surprising that real politics gets pushed outside the system? Busher, too, does not say much about this. Asked about it, he says he doesn’t see the electoral system as a big factor. But he does say that the activists he met seemed to have little opportunity for civic engagement.

Waiting for the EDL, Newcastle, May 2010 (Lionheart Photography/Creative Commons)
The latter might be a key to an important part of Busher’s approach: his analysis of “world-building”.  A recurrent theme through the book is the way in which activists’ beliefs, lifestyles and relationship reinforce another.  If one wants to look at how people get involved with groups like the EDL, he argues, one needs not to focus just on “anger, hatred, resentment and indignation”. We may learn more from looking at the social interactions within the group; how they feel pride and shame in having (for example) looked after each other on a demonstration, or made sacrifices to go leafletting in the evening.  These interactions also extend to the way EDL members share information.

What is important for Busher, however, is the way these interactions, and the web of common assumptions they create – “world-making” – tells us more about the EDL than “simply pathologising activists as angry, white, damaged and vulnerable men seeking to protect their social status and reassert their compromised masculinity... [or seeing] such groups as somehow springing forth from generalised anxieties about how the country is changing, perceptions of declining economic and cultural opportunities, declining trust in the political elite and so forth.”

Is he right about this? That distrust of the elite, and anxiety about unasked-for cultural change, are both clearly drivers for anti-minority activism. There is plenty of evidence for that in this book (the nostalgia some activists have for an older England, the horror of mosques springing up, their fury at Cameron’s 2011 attacks on the EDL). Even so, the “world-building” approach is an interesting slant, and suggests that activists are finding, within the EDL, precisely that social and civic engagement that eludes them elsewhere. If so, the implications are fascinating.  In 2008 Vernon Bogdanor pointed out that when Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 it had a membership of about 1.5 million; 30 years later it was down to 145,000.Labour underwent a similar decline between 1996 and 2008, from 400,000 to 150,000. In the 1950s one Briton in 11 had belonged to a political party; by 2008 just one in 88 did. I think there is something here that we need to understand.

*

Do these two books help us understand anti-Muslim, and by extension right-wing, activism?

Both writers have gone out to talk to real people. This is surely more useful than writing editorials for the Spectator (or New Statesman). Beyond that, they’re very different books. Busher’s is (burgers apart) firmly rooted in academic discourse; this may put some readers off. It shouldn’t, because Busher writes well and although the general reader isn’t the intended audience, they’ll find it perfectly readable. What they may baulk at is the book’s cover price. This is a pity, because this excellent book is very timely. Busher presents the movement and its members without preconceptions, and this is essential; it must be understood if its influence is to be challenged.

The Daily Mail, January 1934
Pai does have preconceptions. Most seriously, she is wrong to underestimate people’s feelings about their identity. In these two areas, Busher’s is the better book. I also disliked Pai’s careless use of figures.

That said, Pai has done well to trace the roots of the EDL, and has made valuable points about the way the disadvantaged are being “divided and ruled” in modern Britain. What she does that Busher does not, is ask in whose interest it is to divide people from each other. This was outside Busher’s remit; he is a sociologist, and was not seeking to impose a political view of his own on his findings. Yet it is important.

And if Pai is not always dispassionate, perhaps we shouldn’t ask her to be. In his introduction to Angry White People, Zephaniah describes how, as a child, he was clobbered from behind with a brick just for being black. As he says, racism is personal. In the book, Pai describes how she visits Wolverhampton to see an EDL activist, and passing youths yell “Mail-order bride” at her. One wonders how it feels to be a woman with multiple degrees and several books to your credit, and to know that because your face is just a little different, some people will still always see you as nothing. There must have been times when she wondered why she was bothering to understand angry white people at all. One reads Busher’s book to understand the EDL. One reads Pai’s to understand why we have to.

Mike Robbins’s novel, The Lost Baggage of Silvia Guzmán (Third Rail, 2014), is available as a paperback (ISBN 978-0-9914374-0-5, $16.99 USA, or £10.07 UK) or as an eBook in all formats, including Amazon Kindle (ISBN 978-0-9914374-2-9, $2.99 USA, or £1.85 UK). Enquiries (including requests for review copies) should be sent to thirdrailbooks@gmail.com.

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