The Brexit debate has created an ideological crisis in the Labour party, driven by its inability to bridge Britain’s sociological crisis. Its leadership has been undermined by angry reaction to last week’s instruction to its MPs to trigger the process of leaving the EU. However, it had already lost the confidence of many of the party’s pragmatists, wary that Labour has found no way to transcend the toxic social divisions between north and south, city and suburbs, young and old that the referendum laid bare.
Faced with a rise in populist sentiment, such are the circumstances for the international left today. Here in the United States, downtrodden and perplexed Democrats are faced with a choice of seeking to win back a white, working-class constituency whose support for their party has dwindled in every presidential election cycle since 1992, or double-down on cultivating their coalition of ethnic minorities and white urban cosmopolitans.
However, unlike America’s Democrats, Labour does not have the luxury of reverting to such a coalition. (It’s not even clear that Democrats do.)
Whereas ethnic minorities of Latino, African and Asian descent comprise 40% of the American population and will pass 50% in due course, minority constituencies in Europe comprise no more than 20% in any one country, so parties of the left must be able to sustain their appeal to white, working-class voters if they are to have any chance of assembling ruling majorities.
The British – and American – left’s mistake was allowing themselves to think there was an “either, or” choice – that their pursuit of racial justice for minority groups was somehow incompatible with their pursuit of economic justice for all; that their celebration of immigration was incompatible with control of immigration; that their quest for meritocracy was incompatible with patriotism.
But here we are. White, working-class people, pivotal electoral constituencies almost everywhere, feel marginalised in the countries they once defined. Frustrated by unresponsive mainstream parties, they are increasingly supporting far-right candidates and agendas such as Brexit, tugging the centre further to the fringe and disorienting a shaken and divided left. “Everything’s gone straight to hell,” Nancy Pemberton (not her real name) told me in Dagenham, where I spent three months conducting research for a transatlantic study of white, working-class politics. A vitriolic, busybody, cockney pensioner, Nancy had voted for Labour, then the BNP and eventually for Ukip.
“It was a community back then,” she said. “It was predominantly English. There was an Asian girl. And there was one black boy whose mother was a big, fat lesbian who didn’t live the quietest of lives. But we always got on and the English were the majority. It has always been diverse, what with us living so near the river. But I remember when we went around the houses for a Christmas charity about 10 years ago and I noticed all the black faces. Now it’s a million times worse.
“The immigrants who came in the 1950s all worked, they learned the language, crunched in a small house until each of them could afford their own. They were English, or as English as could be. These people in the 1950s didn’t expect something for nothing. They integrated. They didn’t try to change us into Africa. The EU is actually promoting migration to England. It’s the best place for benefits. And we’ve already got enough of our own who are too lazy to get off their arses.”
Labourites reading Nancy’s thoughts will surely have their mouths agape, disgusted by her vulgar, unabashed prejudice. Someone like that has no business in the Labour party, you likely believe. Yet Nancy must be part of the Labour party if it is to have any future. Many of you don’t want to listen further to her perspectives, because they are so overtly tainted by racism and xenophobia. But you must listen carefully if you are to ever understand your countrymen and earn their support again.
Anti-racism has been an important concept for Labour and international leftists for a more than a generation. It has informed advances in anti-discrimination policies for housing, government and the workplace. It has cultivated cohesion and openness in neighbourhoods, schools, and universities. It has fostered greater sensitivity to our inherent biases in our social interactions, our media and in our own minds.
However, the label of racism has also been extended to characterise the views of people who seek a more managed immigration system, who are wary of globalising markets and, indeed, who support Britain’s opaque, ill-advised, but now inevitable departure from the European Union.
Every interaction has become a cause. Where racism is sensed, the guilty party is deemed to be corrupted and must be disavowed or educated in the realities of white privilege. While noble in intent, in this process the concept of racism has lost meaning for people like Nancy. It is seen as an instrument for silencing them, invalidating their perspectives, a publicly legitimised excuse to stop listening. It is little wonder that political entrepreneurs such as Nigel Farage and Donald Trump succeeded by condemning the “political correctness brigade”. Their followers wanted to be heard.
Two dozen of my white, working-class interviewees in Dagenham prefaced statements to me by saying: “I’m not a racist, but…” Given what came after, I realised that this was not the triumph of newfound sensitivity but rather their way of saying: “Listen to what I’m about to tell you before you judge me!”
Some of what followed could be fairly construed to be racist, yet people such as Nancy have more to say. Many white, working-class residents of Barking and Dagenham had prepared for futures in a manufacturing economy. When it swiftly collapsed in a global movement offshore, vast communities were left unemployed with few prospects. This came at a moment when government was reducing the provision of free university education, practical training and other social services that would have helped white, working-class workers adapt to the information and service-driven economy.
With their decline in wages, job stability and economic mobility, many white, working-class neighbourhoods declined socially. Domestic strife, single parenting and crime rose. With the loss of disposable income, people were unable to spend on football teams, working men’s clubs and pubs – critical centres of community life that built norms of reciprocity and community engagement.
This socioeconomic transformation coincided with a great demographic transformation. During the same period, millions of immigrants from south Asia, sub-Saharan Africa and eastern Europe settled in the United Kingdom. Entrepreneurial and ambitious, they opened businesses, community spaces and pursued higher education. Their children made claims of the political system and elected representatives, visible symbols of their permanence and investment in Britain.
Many low-rent, white, working-class neighbourhoods were ideal for these aspirational arrivals. Public housing began to be distributed to refugees and large families in need. Old shops were converted to houses of worship. Tales of wage competition from immigrants spread. The rise of immigrants coincided with the decline of white, working-class life and many could only assume that the two were correlated.
Yet no one in the Labour party appeared bothered enough to intervene. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer,” Tony Blair said in his 2005 Labour conference speech. “The character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.”
Thinking of what can be done, Nancy yearned for an unlikely ally. She shook her head and reached to pick a few weeds from her garden. “If I could just bring back Maggie Thatcher. She would never have let all this happen.” Herein lies Labour’s greatest failure: it has allowed its pursuit of racial justice to appear incompatible with its pursuit of economic justice. The Thatcher-driven excesses of globalisation – regressive tax breaks, the privatisation of industry and housing, cutbacks in public services – produced greater inequality and immobilised poor people, independent of race. But the left is so concerned with debates over which disadvantaged group has it worse that it has undermined the strength of the working class as a whole.
For Labour, racism unfairly tainted the white working class. Now, for the white working class, anti-racism has unfairly tainted Labour.
The party must empathise again, listen again, recognise the plight of its white, working-class constituents before judgment and build a social vision and economic future that transcends ethnic divisions, not reinforces them.
In the same conference speech, Blair warned that without an embrace of change, “the values we believe in become idle sentiments, ripe for disillusion and disappointment”. He never could have imagined that the values he instilled in his party could lead to such disillusion, such disappointment. It is time that Labour changes, too.