Beyond Grievance (eBook)

Introduction

Britain is at a crossroads. While I am firmly of the view that it is one of the most successful examples of a multiracial democracy in the post-Second World War world, we find ourselves in challenging times. While the UK has spent much of the twenty-first century ‘nation-building’ in faraway lands such as Afghanistan – to no great effect – ours seems to be an increasingly fragmented society with depressingly low levels of political trust. There is a certain ridiculousness involved in spearheading grand ‘nation-building’ exercises abroad when you’re one of the leading countries in the world for family breakdown and loneliness among the elderly – worrying features of the British mainstream that I talk about a fair bit in this book. Left-behind neighbourhoods – economically deprived, socially atomised, culturally demoralised – can be found in every corner of Britain. Believe me, I am more positive and optimistic than most – but the current social, political and economic situation is not sustainable. Britain needs a mature and traditional social-democratic party more than ever – one which emphasises the value of stability and security.

There have been two significant developments in recent times which have had extraordinary impacts on our national socio-political discourse and exposed the lack of intellectual maturity and moral decency on the left: the UK’s decision to leave the European Union and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Back in June 2016, the former both revealed and intensified social and political divides. One of the sharpest dividing lines between Leave and Remain voters was their respective perceptions of cultural diversity in modern Britain and the degree to which they were satisfied with the democratic system. Leave voters were more likely to prioritise immigration as a policy concern, hold more negative views on multiculturalism and express dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in Britain. None of these are unreasonable positions to hold, when one considers how the British political classes have been intensely relaxed over the toxic mixture of mass immigration and failed integration outcomes.

Some of the explanations provided for Brexit were beyond woeful. Former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable argued that it was driven by ‘white nostalgia’ – a longing for a bygone era when Britain had a monoracial society.1 He was not alone – a swathe of pro-Remain politicians, journalists and academics sought to present Brexit as a racist project: a divisive enterprise driven by swivel-eyed provincial reactionary throwbacks who could not cope with the number of brown and black faces in Britain (which, far more often than not, originated from non-EU countries).

Julia Ward, the former Labour MEP for the North West England region, labelled Brexit a ‘right wing fascist coup’.2 When one considers the longstanding tradition of Eurosceptic left politics, embodied by historical Labour Party figures such as Tony Benn and Peter Shore, it is clear that this shameless caricature of Brexit is a fundamental misrepresentation. Then we had the ultra-identitarian MP for Tottenham, David Lammy, who compared the pro-Leave European Research Group (ERG) faction of the Conservative Party to the Nazis and those who were complicit in the enforcement of apartheid in South Africa.3 I am not sure ERG members such as Steve Baker and Jacob Rees-Mogg quite resemble the likes of Adolf Hitler (or Daniël François Malan, for that matter). For a man of black-Caribbean origin to exploit the atrocities that occurred under Nazism and the racially motivated brutalisation under apartheid in order to score cheap points over Brexit was shameful – as was the sheer lack of condemnation it was met with within the Labour Party.

These simplistic narratives peddled by supposedly enlightened sophisticates are not only grossly offensive but fundamentally detached from the reality on the ground. And, crucially, they ‘whitewash’ the fact that one in three ethnic-minority voters backed Brexit and decided – for a multitude of reasons – that the UK is better off outside the EU. My home town of Luton – where I have lived for three decades – has a majority-non-white population and delivered a Leave vote of 56.5 per cent.4 This included patriotic Gujarati Hindu and Punjabi Sikh elders who believed that the UK needed to extricate itself from what they considered the sclerotic and inefficient EU and strengthen its ties with the Commonwealth. These are salt-of-the-earth, community-spirited people who take pride in their British identity – and do not feel an ounce of ‘Europeanness’. And neither were they willing to accept a UK immigration regime in which, under EU freedom of movement, predominantly white-European migrants were the beneficiaries of preferential treatment.

Data suggests that Euroscepticism in Britain’s South Asian population – particularly the UK’s Indian ethnic group – was stronger than was generally thought ahead of the June 2016 referendum on EU membership. Look at Osterley and Spring Grove. A relatively affluent, non-white-majority ward in the west-London borough of Hounslow, it returned a Leave vote of 63.4 per cent.5 Defying the wider national trend, non-white ethnicity was associated with voting Leave in the two multi-ethnic west-London boroughs of Hounslow and Ealing. Along with Luton, a number of jurisdictions with large South Asian populations also delivered Leave votes: Hillingdon (56.4 per cent), Slough (54.3 per cent) and Bradford (54.2 per cent).6 All have South Asian populations of 25 per cent or above.7 It is fair to assume that these figures relied on healthy support for Brexit among voters of South Asian origin.

I have wondered if political journalists and correspondents are aware of these voting patterns. If so, where were the vox pops with pro-Brexit, first-generation South Asian elders in large towns such as Luton and Slough? How many economically secure west Londoners of Indian origin have been asked by mainstream media outlets to articulate their Eurosceptic views? Why did the homeowning, higher-status workers in Osterley, many of whose origins are in Gujarat and the Punjab, not vote in a way – according to liberal convention – that their socio-economic class would predict? Their views could have added great value to the national coverage as to how the Leave vote came about – something that still seems to mystify many. London-based journalists didn’t have to visit working-men’s clubs in the north or pubs in the provincial Midlands to find Brexit voters – they could have looked no further than the mandirs and gurdwaras of west London.

Osterley is a ten-minute drive from Sky News HQ, and comfortably under an hour from BBC Broadcasting House on the Tube. So why the myopia? Perhaps it is simply a case of the media being incredibly lax, not with their travel plans but with their research. But perhaps it was too much of a challenge to the narrative that the June 2016 Leave result was the product of nostalgic, left-behind, poorly educated, misinformed white working-class folk – low-resourced ‘simpletons’ driven by their basic jingoistic impulses. This kind of patronising and condescending narrative has tragically gained a foothold in liberal-left politics – that Brexit was brought on by prejudicial and witless white people in the provinces who were simply not knowledgeable or cultured enough to form their own view on the UK’s place in the EU.

Media clips of Leave voters were too often restricted to white working-class people in abandoned coastal towns and ailing post-industrial districts left battered by the harsh winds of globalisation. Soundbites such as ‘Make Britain great again’ and ‘Put the “great” back in Great Britain’ were typical. As well as featuring on primetime TV, these segments have been pushed out as digestible clips on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The idea of Brexit as a ‘white working-class revolt’ – an uprising of the nostalgic in stagnant regions abandoned by the London-centric political establishment – has some truth in it. But what is also true is that mainstream coverage of ‘Brexit Britain’ illustrated why the media cannot be fully trusted to delve into why important political and social events, such as the Leave vote in June 2016, take place. The appetite for thorough investigation and the reporting of realities has increasingly given way to the ideologically motivated peddling of reductive narratives.

In the case of Brexit, the dominant media narratives failed spectacularly to capture the complex nature of British Euroscepticism. Brexit exposed an unfortunate reality: that the media’s commitment to reporting the facts, pure and simple, leaves a lot to be desired. And while this could be the product of bad journalism and poor research, there is also the possibility that the media’s ‘research and inform’ function has been usurped by a role as ‘narrative manufacturer’. The reality is that Brexit was a thoroughly multi-ethnic, cross-class enterprise – one could even say a socio-political corrective, unified by a desire to free the UK from a dogmatic and unstable EU political project, restore national sovereignty over important policy issues such as immigration and revitalise a democratic system that was being hollowed out in the name of distant technocratic managerialism. If Brexit is not treated as a catalyst for social, economic and democratic renewal, that is ultimately a failure of our ruling political classes – dominated by self-serving incompetents obsessed with vanity projects.

Brexit, which both highlighted and exacerbated...