Opinion A view of the chasm

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A key slogan of the anti-EU Leave campaign was “Take back control”. It was often derided as hollow and meaningless by Remain supporters. For many sections of working class voters, however, whose world seems to have been turned upside down by forces that they cannot shape, it was a sentiment that resonated deeply. “One of the biggest failures” of contemporary mainstream political parties, as the American philosopher Michael Sandel recently observed, “has been the failure to take seriously people’s aspiration to feel that they have some meaningful say in shaping the forces that govern their lives”.

In 1950s Britain, manual workers accounted for 70 per cent of the male workforce in Britain. Nearly 10 million people belonged to trade unions. The Labour Party had strong links to the working class. The so-called “postwar consensus” — the cross-party acceptance of Keynesianism, publicly-owned industries and the welfare state — allowed union leaders to influence government policy. All this helped incubate within working class communities a sense of identity and solidarity and fostered a belief that ordinary people could shape the political process.

All that is no more. The postwar consensus has been shattered through the entrenchment of free market policies. Britain’s manufacturing industry has all but disappeared. Public services have been cut, and austerity imposed. Trade unions have been neutered. The Labour Party has largely abandoned its traditional working class base. Society has become much more atomised and riven by identity politics. The world seems much more precarious. The forms of organisation that once gave working class lives identity and dignity have disappeared.

All this has left many feeling voiceless and detached from the political process. It has also helped redraw the political map. The main political faultline today, not just in Britain but throughout Europe, is less that between left and right than that between those who feel at home in the new globalised, technocratic world, and those who feel left out and disempowered. It is a faultline perfectly expressed in the EU referendum vote, particularly in England.

The reasons for the marginalisation of the working class have been economic and political. But many have come to see it primarily as a cultural loss. As people have become disenchanted with politics, so the language of culture has become increasingly important as the means through which to make sense of society and social relations.

As economic and political change has come to be perceived as a cultural loss, so those regarded as culturally different have come to be viewed as threats. “Taking back control” has become translated into a desire to protect borders, defend national culture, and keep out immigrants.

The failure of the left to address either the democratic deficit or the sense of social dislocation felt by many sections of the working class has meant that a progressive desire for a democratic voice has become intertwined with regressive arguments about immigration, nationalism and protectionism.

The trouble is, in the wake of the referendum vote, those on the other side of the political faultline have responded with the same kinds of attitudes that led so many to vote Brexit in the first place. Supporters of the pro-EU Remain camp have raged against the “idiots” and “racists” swayed by xenophobia and lies. Many have demanded a second referendum. They have urged MPs to block any moves towards Brexit in the interest of voters who know no better. They have, in other words, treated the working class, and the democratic process, with the same contempt that first created the chasm between the political elite and large sections of voters.

The only consequence can be to make the disaffected even more disaffected and to fuel support for the populists and the far right. Two figures who have made much of the running in the past few days have been the UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage and Marine le Pen of the French Front National. The latter even had an op-ed piece in the New York Times, applauding the “courage” of the British people to embrace their “freedom” and calling on the rest of Europe to launch a “People’s Spring”. It may be repugnant to see a far-right, racist party appropriate the language of freedom and liberty. It is only able to do so because it is able to speak to the constituencies that the left has abandoned. Groups such as the UKIP and the FN draw upon racist support. But many others are drawn to such parties because these seem to be the only organisations willing to give voice to their grievances.

In Britain, not only has a wide swathe of the electorate become disaffected from the political class, but the political class itself seems to have disintegrated. Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned. The Chancellor, George Osborne, has been barely seen since last Thursday, despite both the stock market and sterling plummeting in value.

The Brexit victors seem equally shocked and unnerved. Boris Johnson, the leading figure in the Leave campaign, had the demeanour, in his post referendum press conference, of someone who had lost. More bizarrely, having been expected to run for the leadership of the Conservative party, Johnson announced on Thursday his withdrawal from the contest. It’s as if no one wants to take charge.

The most spectacular implosion has, however, been in the opposition Labour party. Three-quarters of its MPs supported a motion of no-confidence in its leftwing leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Some are talking of splitting off and creating a new organisation. A party that has already lost wide swathes of its voters now threatens to tear itself apart, perhaps terminally.

Britain is currently a nation without a functioning government or a credible opposition, and unable to formulate any policy to help navigate through its current crisis. That crisis, though, is not simply one of Brexit. It is of economic and social policies that have devastated communities and left them feeling voiceless. It is of politicians who would rather scapegoat migrants than address problems of austerity and the democratic deficit, and who would then condemn disaffected voters as racist. It is of a left that has abandoned its traditional working class constituencies, and which sees “internationalism” in the top-down structures of the EU rather than in the creation of solidarity built from the bottom up.

And these are not simply British problems. They are issues that now face every European nation. It is the ability to navigate through these more fundamental crises that will determine what becomes of Europe in the coming years.