Immigrations

Gary Younge, writing in the Guardian in the wake of the referendum vote for the UK to leave the EU, notes: ‘The pollsters were wrong; the currency traders were wrong; the pundits were confounded. People who did not feel they had been heard have not just spoken. Given a one-off chance to tell the world what they think of how they are governed they have screamed a piercing cry of alienation and desperation. Given the choice between the status quo and change (changing something, anything) Britain voted for change. It got its wish. This will change everything.’

But, tellingly, Younge insists, ‘Britain is no more sovereign than it was yesterday. We will leave the EU but remain within the neoliberal system. Left to the mercy of the markets we are arguably now less capable of directing our affairs than we were. We are not independent. We are simply isolated … Britain is not greater for this decision and this campaign but smaller, weaker and more vulnerable.’

Younge writes that the Remain campaign ‘was tone deaf to an insurrectionary mood that suffered fools more gladly than experts’, but that ‘Wheeling out John Major, Tony Blair and Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, they failed to realise that the surrogates they were employing represented the very establishment with which people are disillusioned … Moreover, it never made a case for Europe, only for not leaving it on the basis that terrible things would happen.’

At the same time, the London-based commentariat had treated ‘the British working class as through they were a less evolved breed from distant parts, all too often betraying them as bigots who did not know what was good for them. Having assumed themselves cosmopolitan, the more self-aware pundits began to realise just how parochial they were: having experienced much of the world, they discovered they didn’t know their own country as well as they might.’

As Younge argues it, ‘if the remain campaign was incompetent and patronising, leave was both inflammatory and irresponsible’. And he acknowledges that ‘it is a banal axiom to insist “it’s not racist to talk about immigration”. It’s not racist to talk about black people, Jews or Muslims either.