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Corbyn must fight anti-immigrant racism |
A majority of recent polls show a
growing, if still shaky lead for the Leave campaign in the EU
referendum. This is deeply worrying for Remainers:
whatever people say about a swing to the status quo in the
final weeks of a campaign, that simply hasn't happened this time - at
least not yet. It seems that in this case, as with so much in
politics around the world at the moment, normal rules no longer
apply.
A few months ago I wrote
that the left's argument about remaining in the EU was made with too
many qualifications to cut through. In that I was
right. But I was also wrong in that I declared, "Nationalism and
Liberalism will carve up the debate between them." Let me
stress, liberalism is nowhere to be seen in this debate. The choice
is between two establishment-co-opted, right-wing nationalisms and
the reason for this boils down to how the left's impotence - or
rather its absence - has negatively impacted on the debate.
The EU referendum has turned into a
regional, racial, and class vote which mirrors almost exactly the
breakdown of results at the 2015 general election. A true blue Tory
English south; a cosmopolitan Labour London; a solid centre-left
showing in Scotland and Wales; and an English north split between
Labour loyalism and UKIP. Balanced for turnout and population spread
(and given the fact this is a simple yes/no vote, unlike the
parliamentary voting system), this shifts the vote in favour of
Brexit. What this means is that the seizure of the Labour Party
leadership by the radical left since the last election has done
little to create new cleavages in the electoral map. It also shows
that most Tory supporters will be voting against the Tory leadership.
In case of a Brexit vote, the big losers will be the leadership of
the established UK parties - Labour in the north; the Tories in the
south.
The 2015 election was the first time a
long-gestating crisis in British politics bore tangible fruit: the
collapse of the Labour vote since 2001; the collapse of wider voter
turnout since 1992. The narrowing policy and ideology gap between
Labour and the Tories led to a collapse of the traditional
representative link between political parties and the voters who
turned out for them. Finally, despite a parliamentary system that
militated against it, politics fragmented. All over the country - and
indeed most of Europe - voters turned to whatever alternatives they
could find. That habit is showing no sign of slowing with this
referendum: voters are choosing to vote against everything the
perceived establishment tells them to do, and they are doing so along
startlingly similar lines to last year.
The crisis in British politics, born of
the victory of Thatcherism and New Labourism, was brought to boiling
point not long after the biggest economic crash in postwar history
and a series of violent global confrontations, all of which have,
needless to say, brought death and instability to much of the globe.
These twin crises have brought to the advanced heartlands of global
capitalism the same morbid symptoms crisis always brings: an
intensification of racism and other burning resentments. It is no
coincidence then that immigration has become the single outstanding
issue of this referendum. Labour and the traditional
social-democratic left has not been able to fight anti-immigrant and
refugee racism because the only intellectually consistent way to do
so is to criticise global capitalism, the crisis policies of the
neoliberal state and imperialist foreign policy. Blairism, indeed the
entire social-democratic tradition, is unable and unwilling to do any
of this. Indeed, while tacitly accepting the economic need for
immigration, Blairism has been quick to attack immigrants when it has
proved politically expedient.
Labour sneaked anti-immigrant rhetoric
into the mainstream. In 2005 Blair
boasted about reducing asylum claims faster than anywhere else in
Europe and claimed he would "put in strict immigration controls
that work." They didn't work - because the UK economy needs
immigration and global population flows are complex things that are
only becoming more complex with - well, all those wars we keep
launching. Now anti-immigrant sentiment has become common sense and
far-right racism a much more acceptable, though still peripheral,
view. That tendency has reared its head again in the EU referendum as
leading Labour Remainers from the right, panicking at the strong
polling of the Brexiters, demand
an end to free movement within the EU. These are the same tawdry,
graceless manoeuvres that made Labour into a laughing stock under
Blair and Ed Milliband and they won't win voters away from either the
Tories or UKIP. The radical left leadership - basically Jeremy Corbyn
and John McDonnell - have not been half as forthright in their
defence of immigration as they ought to be. Indeed a defence of
immigration is the only way the public conversation can be led away
from the issue and towards the real causes of the stress on public
services: the budgetary pressure on local government; the lack of
revenue coming in to central government; the squeeze on NHS funding;
the refusal to increase the pace of house building. Anti-immigrant
sentiment cannot be ignored - and only a radical left
leadership of Labour have the moral authority to fight it.
This brings us back to what happens
after the vote. For the left the referendum itself is a purely
tactical question: the choice between the cartelised, belligerent,
authoritarian institutions of the EU on the one hand and the free
market utopia espoused by elements of the British establishment on
the other. Not forgetting, of course, the conduits of financialised
capital which operate (and will continue to operate no matter what)
between them. That choice has become clearer and clearer - there is
no lesser-evil option, a Liberal soft option which will spare us the
nastiness of unleashed nationalism. The intensification and
increasing visibility of anti-immigrant sentiment which has resulted
from Labour triangulation and establishment vilification of migrants
and refugees is likely to be the awful legacy of this referendum
whatever the outcome.
Here's my bet: a close remain victory
will nevertheless see UKIP massively emboldened in the north, where
they will replace the Tories as the second place to Labour and even
overtake Labour in some constituencies. Anti-immigrant frustration,
even of the quiet and simmering kind, will turn into outright racism.
That racism is partly conjured by elites looking for a useful
distraction but its base materials are a sense of powerlessness and a
feeling that the ruling order is inevitable and unchangeable. It can
only be quelled where there are meaningful attacks on and victories
against the real source of wage repression, flatlining productivity,
shitty jobs, decaying public services and infrastructure: that is,
neoliberal capitalism.
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