Deborah Orr in The Guardian
The last 16 months have made one thing clear: it’s much easier to vote to leave the EU than it is to actually leave. Remainers such as myself now find it tempting to say: “I told you so.” This, broadly speaking, is because we’re a bunch of smug know-it-alls, who haven’t even properly asked ourselves why we failed so badly to get our point across last June.
The answer, of course, is that we were and are too busy being smug know-it-alls: certain before the referendum that the idealism of the EU was plain for everyone except the terminally thick and racist to see; and certain afterwards that surely at some point even the terminally thick and racist will start having buyers’ remorse.
The sheer tragicomedy of EU-UK negotiations is indeed getting some people so fed up with the whole farrago that a few Brexiteers are crossing the floor. But, mostly, people view the difficulty of leaving the EU as yet more proof that it’s a money-grabbing, navel-gazing, inert and self-serving bureaucracy, as respectful of democracy as Kim Jong-un and as responsive to the needs of actual people as a gigantic mudslide. An in-depth survey of Brexiteers in Wales last month confirmed pretty much exactly that.
Politicians do understand, on the whole, that the factor above all others that motivates white working-class Brexit voters is free movement, as again the Welsh survey attests. This is why Labour in particular is hamstrung. Backing remain would please its Guardian-reading supporters. But that would alienate many of its core voters. Whatever Jeremy Corbyn’s own views about the EU, the sensible strategy for the short-term is not to seem at all remain-oriented.
Short-term being the operative word. The big trouble with the idealism of free movement is that its intellectual underpinnings demand pain now for future gain. The idea is that people will crisscross the various member countries, working where there’s work to create economic growth, returning home with money, experience and ideas, to start businesses that will attract others in turn, until every country is as prosperous as its neighbour.
This transformation, if it happens, will take generations. But the architects of this grand plan – the experts, the economists, the “elite” – are not the people who feel any short-term pain.
It’s completely unrealistic to ask people to spend their lives wondering where the money is coming from to pay the next electricity bill, whether their children will ever get out of their expensive private accommodation, and whether their grandchildren will be on zero-hours contracts forever, all so that maybe 80 years from now the average living standard of a Lithuanian will be similar to that of a Welshman.
People need their lives to improve now, not to live in stress and worry because things might work out in the future. The theoretical utopians who support the EU are not those who are expected to feel solidarity with their Polish colleagues in the salad-bagging factory. Especially when those colleagues are working towards a different goal. It’s easier to work for low wages if these wages are higher than you would be getting back home; easier to save when you know that a deposit on a house back home with your family is an achievable goal; easier to go without when you know that it’s for a finite time.
Where in the EU do young, unskilled British people head to get such a start in life? Reciprocity doesn’t exist.
In the 1980s, builders went to Germany, as dramatised in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. In Germany today, builders come from eastern Europe. Wealthy countries in the EU are rightly expected to be generous. But when your own country has not generously shared its wealth with you, it’s hard to accept that you’re the ones expected to carry the burden in this grand new wealth-sharing concept.
In his book Austerity Britain, historian David Kynaston quoted evidence from the Mass Observation project that the people who lived in the areas most devastated by the war were far less likely to be optimistic about the future than those who had got off lightly. Part of their ennui was the knowledge that change had been promised after the first world war, yet hadn’t come about.
The same goes for the areas that were economically devastated in the early stages of globalisation. The EU didn’t save them then; it isn’t saving them now. No amount of promises that the EU is the best hope of shelter from economic change in the future will persuade enough of the hard-up Brexiteers in that 52% vote.
If progressives want to change the minds of Brexiteers, waiting for them to see the error of their ways isn’t going to work. What people need is a quid pro quo that offers them tangible improvements in their lives right now. That, and only that, will keep Britain in the EU.
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