Respect the 52%

The recent UK referendum on Brexit was a momentous event. I feel lucky that I wasn’t living in my national homeland during the campaign, since I understand it was unseemly at both macro and micro levels. The country and its leaders did not perform with class or grace, with truth or logic playing very minor roles on both sides. But the most difficult aspect would probably have been the strain on personal relationships. Many of my friends there have talked about how they have become estranged from long-term friends, and I expect that would have happened with me as well. Being in the US helped me to keep my mouth shut and my judgments private.

I predict a similar challenge within the US over the coming few months with the Trump/Clinton presidential campaign. Rather like Brexit, it is rather tempting to characterize one side as racist, closed and intolerant. Sitting on our well-educated comfortable, informed high horses, we struggle to respect anyone who admits to a temptation to vote for Brexit or for Trump. Listening to those campaigning for Brexit or Trump only reinforces this, since both campaigns go out of their way to use the dog whistle and promote hate.

My weekly periodicals, The Economist and the Guardian Weekly, have, no surprise, been unusually united in their support for staying in the EU. Nearly all their arguments resonate with me. Economically, it must make sense to punch with the weight of a powerful trade and standards bloc, though I suspect the outcome won’t be quite as bad as the doom-mongers are now predicting, since many of the economics effects will be pretty marginal. Personally, I am more concerned with the politics. I have read books describing the build up to both world wars, and a common feature is a set of events which by themselves seem inconsequential but together lead to tragedy. There must be a chance that June 23 2016 is later seen as one such event, and for that reason alone I could not see myself contemplating support for Brexit.

Mixed in with some mourning and some moaning and some reasonable diagnosis and predictions, the periodicals both suggest a new division of the electorate. The descriptions differ but similar adjectives appear. Open against closed is the most common pairing. Then you get descriptions such as educated, tolerant, self-reliant, modern, forward-looking or optimistic on the open side, and anti-immigrant (or worse) on the closed side. Demographic distinctions come second – the open group is more predominantly urban and generally younger.

As someone who likes to see himself as all of the open adjectives (well, maybe not so young anymore), I lap all this up, just as I lap up the mainstream disdain for Trump in the US. But then I thought a little bit harder, and decided that it was not terribly tolerant to judge more than half of my compatriots so damningly. It might also be described as elitist or patronising.

So I decided to try a bit harder to get into the shoes of the 52%. Might they actually be right? Or might they be at least partly right, or right from their own interests?

The immigration aspect is hard to condone but not so hard to understand. I have had the benefit of a life in many diverse neighbourhoods, but in my early years I was pretty racist, just like nearly everyone around me. I feared difference, and tried to be in the dominant clan. I was brought up to think that all Russians were somehow evil and bent on destroying our society, but not to dwell on judging white South Africans, so it is not so surprising that I was also suspicious of people of colour.

In most places, racism is strongest where diversity is lowest, where people have not had experiences to counter-balance their fears. But we should also not discount the real burdens of immigration on some, and it is interesting that in the referendum the highest “leave” share was in districts with the highest east-European immigration, the agricultural heartlands of the fens. Here it is quite possible that immigration has diminished job prospects, with wages having plummeted while hours have increased and conditions worsened. Is it closed or racist or backward-looking to resent that if I come from there? It is not so easy to up sticks and head for London if my roots and experience are agricultural.

Then there is the whole question of globalisation, the dominant trend of the period that the UK has been in the EU. True, the EU has not been the cause of globalisation, indeed in some ways has tried to soften its impact, but the EU is globalising in the fact that it breaks down national sovereignty, and if I’m a loser I’m not going to dwell too long on analysing causes.

And losers there are many. Remain proponents banged on about GDP, but that means little if median wages are stagnating and inequality raging. A generation ago, a family often had a local job to see them through to a decent retirement. Such certainties are long gone, and families are dispersed and stressed as a result.

Consider also finance. A family will have had a mortgage before, arranged from a standard suite from a local building society. Since 1980 they will have very likely been mis-sold an endowment mortgage, been persuaded to take a couple of credit cards, been forced to learn the hard way about pension plans and student loans and been led down the garden path with a few privatisation shares. Spare cash often evaporates into black holes of the national lottery and ubiquitous sports betting. All of this – except the retirement maze – has been discretionary, but should we really judge families who have become entrapped this way?

Meanwhile, the elites have hardly put on a stellar performance in other areas. That same family may have lost a son in Iraq or Afghanistan and still wonder why. Housing policy has served only the wealthy. And over the last ten years public services and investment have been repeatedly slashed in the name of austerity, to seemingly little purpose beyond bailing out bankers.

These families don’t really want to hear any more from experts, as Michael Gove pointed out during the campaign. And who can blame them for blaming the EU, at least in part, since Dacre and Murdoch and politicians of all stripes have never lost an opportunity to do so?

So before we condemn 52% of our population as closed or worse, let us step into their shoes for a short while. We should certainly cast harsh judgement on our so-called leaders. Cameron was reckless with his nation’s future and could never be credible during the campaign since anyone making his arguments should never have called a referendum in the first place. Johnson was criminally opportunistic, Corbyn woefully ineffectual, Farage disgracefully bigoted. There is some schadenfreude in seeing all of these villains receive some comeuppance, but at what cost to us all? None, by the way, to the City slickers, who will now make a killing as parasites of global finance, the UK as one giant offshore haven.

Americans would do well to observe and learn. By all means disparage Trump the bully and Christie the opportunist, but think twice before extending condemnation to everyone who might consider voting for them. Instead, think hard about how to deal with the causes of their disquiet, and create a positive storyline that can be applicable beyond the lucky few, with emphasis on social and economic mobility to extend opportunity more widely.

That indeed might indicate a better segmentation than open versus closed. How about lucky versus unlucky? Us lucky 48% may have run out of luck this time. But didn’t we deserve that? And who are likely to be the real losers in the longer run, the lucky 48% or the unlucky 52%?