This is jitter week for those campaigning to remain in Europe. A series of polls put leave ahead, the pound plummeted in fright, and every bolt has been shot warning of a Brexit economic shock. Just two weeks away Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Nigel Farage may triumph in Trafalgar Square.
What will have brought us to this state of self-destruction? That very British disease — class. The great social divide will finally have done for us, though not in ways predicted: Not through revolution, not through Marcusian 1968 — imagined uprising by the workers assisted by students and intellectuals. Revolt against “elites” takes a bizarre form when led by a pair of right-wing Etonian and Dulwich College populist chancers, stirring up xenophobia. But the them-and-us issue has erupted and it has crystal clear origins.
A series of YouGov surveys formed a social-class game in the Sunday Times, beloved by the smug British right. “Do you like to feast on egg and chips at Morrisons before driving home in the Nissan to watch Top Gear? Then it’s likely you will vote for Brexit. If you buy garlic bread at Waitrose before settling down to a Game of Thrones box set, you’ll probably vote ‘remain’.” A list of class/taste questions follow, such as “Who would you invite to dinner? Katie Hopkins or Stephen Fry? What do you drive? Vauxhall or Volkswagen?”
You know the trope only too well, whether it was back in the day of Nancy Mitford’s repellent “U and Non-U” list of words denoting your class, or John Betjeman’s nasty ode to snobbery: “Phone for the fish knives, Norman, Ascook is a little unnerved.”
But this is no parlour game. YouGov has ‘leave’ four percentage points ahead, and its charts reveal the social split in referendum intentions: 50 per cent of ABC1s are for remain, but only 29 per cent of C2DEs at the other end of the socio-economic scale. Only 39 per cent of ABC1s are considering leave, compared with 53 per cent of C2DEs. YouGov’s social indicators put 57 per cent of the population into the ABC1 category — so remainers will hope greater numbers and propensity to vote could save the day. But it’s that sense that the working class is left behind, diminished in numbers and under-represented in everything that causes the alienating social rift.
The Vote Leave campaign, devised by a highly educated elite, has opted for a low “know-nothing” appeal. What else is left when every economic authority, every friendly country, the unions and business all call for remain? John Major called the leave campaign “squalid” and so it is, for appealing to ignorance like any tinpot demagogue: “The people of this country have had enough of experts from organisations with acronyms saying they know what is best,” Gove said in the Sky News debate — an ex-president of the Oxford union pretending contempt for “sneering elites”. Like Little Red Book-waving Maoists, the Brexiteers dismiss as “elite” anyone of any prominence, any “luvvie” in the arts, all holders of knowledge and experience.
Their descent into cynical opportunism has winded the remain camp. No one expected them to lie so shamelessly, as they simply ignore all scrutiny of their claims. Unlike normal elections, they just don’t care when claims of impossible savings spent five times over are exposed. Facts are irrelevant. Admonished by the chief statistician for their “we send £350 million a week to the EU” lie, they simply repainted their bus with “£50 million a day” — the same. They lie about immigration, Gove swearing to bring it under 100,000. Yet 200,000 a year come from outside the European Union (EU), and their racially targeted leaflets promise Pakistanis and Bangladeshis more visas for those countries once EU migrants are denied.
Immigration is Brexit’s winner. The bottom 10 per cent do lose out by importing unskilled labour, according to the Bank of England. For them, that’s a real effect all governments have failed to remedy. But the focus on migrants conveniently displaces deeper causes of discontent about the loss of good jobs, as a third of people are left behind, never to be property owners. It wasn’t always that way: The late 1970s were the most equal time in our history, when boardrooms dared not pay themselves obscene sums and unions stopped pay falling back. But since Margaret Thatcher took the lid off “aspiration” for the top few, inequality soared and never recovered. Labour redistributed with tax credits and invested in public services — but that’s been swept away. Brexit would reap whirlwinds for the inequality sowed over the past 35 years.
The right has used immigration and a diet of lies about the EU to distract from austerity-stricken public services, most damaging to those whose living standards have stagnated for over a decade. University education has expanded, leaving little for the other school leavers but shoddy false apprenticeships and stripped-down further education colleges. Social mobility has fossilised. There would be an awful justice if that lack of education finally did the country in.
Economists, including the governor of the Bank of England, warn that inequality is the great economic risk. Capitalism eats itself when too many get left too far behind to consume its products. Insane investment in over-inflated house prices instead of job-creating production devours the nation’s wealth. If the dispossessed up-end the economy with a leave vote, it may serve the country right — though as ever, the poorest would lose most.
Out on the doorstep over the last weeks, the class divide jumps off the canvass forms as lower income Labour voters go Brexit, and Labour MPs turn ashen-faced. Yet, when confronted with what a Johnson/Gove/Farage government meant, I found many did change their mind. Will enough Labour people get out there, making the case? Jeremy Corbyn’s contribution has been more saboteur than saviour, dismissing the remain case as “histrionic”, “myth-making”, “prophecies of doom”. But Labour canvassers talking to their own side are good persuaders — and there is still time.
If enthusiasm flags, turn to the Open Europe site for the top 100 regulations quoted by Gove and Johnson as £600 million of red tape to be burned. The long list of environmental and working rights will chill your marrow. Away go rights for agency workers, waste management, water quality, sex discrimination, nitrate pollution, air quality, asbestos, pesticides, road vehicle testing, food flavouring, farm animal welfare and scores more. Imagine a bonfire of all that?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Polly Toynbee is a columnist for the Guardian. She was formerly BBC social affairs editor, columnist and associate editor of the Independent.
