The End of Reason: Lies, Distortions and Misplaced Anger in the EU Referendum’s Brexit Camp

Remembering Guantánamo’s Dead Afghan Held at Guantánamo Since 2007,...

The End of Reason: Lies, Distortions and Misplaced Anger in the EU Referendum’s Brexit Camp

I thought it was time to make my feelings clear about the EU referendum vote. I know the EU is a profoundly flawed entity, but as I’ve been saying since David Cameron, demonstrating supreme cowardice, agreed to a referendum to placate UKIP and far right critics in his own party, the only way leaving the EU would be acceptable would be if we immediately had a socialist revolution — and that’s not going to happen. Instead, as former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has explained, we must reform it from within.

A leave vote will be a vote for the terrible racism and intolerance that has been ramped up as a result of the referendum, but that has been cynically promoted by the media and politicians for far too long. A leave vote is not only an unwise leap into the dark economically, but will legitimise the leadership ambitions of Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Iain Duncan Smith and Nigel Farage — who are all disgraceful, self-seeking, deluded and/or sociopathic figures — and the racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia that they have been so shamefully promoting. In addition, please don’t think for a moment that I’m defending David Cameron and other ministers who are currently calling for us to remain in the EU, because they have criticised Europe relentlessly over the years, and have undertaken more than their fair share of immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia.

What depresses me profoundly is how, through self-delusion, as well as the encouragement of the media and politicians, far too many of my fellow citizens have concluded that immigration and the EU are the reasons they are feeling so put upon and isolated, when the truth is that everything they are complaining about is actually the fault of the bankers who caused the global crash in 2008, the politicians of all the main parties who have unquestioningly supported big business and the banks over the needs of the people, and the Tories (whether Leave or Remain supporters) who, since 2010, have presided over an “age of austerity” designed to cynically dismantle the British state in an unprecedented manner, which has involved punishing the poor, the unemployed and the disabled while further enriching those who are already well-off, and pandering relentlessly to the global super-rich.

I posted a version of the three paragraphs above on Facebook, with the photo of myself wearing a T-shirt provided by the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign group, and in this article I’d like to add a few more thoughts, primarily in relation to “Brexit supporters have unleashed furies even they can’t control,” an article Polly Toynbee wrote for the Guardian last week, after she spent time with the Labour MP Margaret Hodge in Barking, and also with Labour supporters in the party’s London HQ, who were making calls to Labour voters around the country in the hope of persuading them to vote to stay in the EU. The results, as Toynbee reported, “were grim.” She continued:

“Out”, “Out” and “Out” in call after call, only a couple for remain. “I’ve been Labour all my life, but I’m for leave,” they said. Why? Always the same – immigrants first; that mythical £350m saving on money sent to Brussels second; “I want my country back” third …

Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere. Warn these Labour people what a Johnson/Gove government would do and they don’t care. Warn about the loss of workers’ rights and they don’t listen – maybe that’s already irrelevant to millions in crap jobs such as at Uber or Sports Direct. “We’re full up. Sorry, there’s no room for more. Can’t get GP appointments, can’t get into our schools, no housing.” If you tell these Labour voters that’s because of Tory austerity cuts, still they blame “immigrants getting everything first”. Warn about a Brexit recession leading to far worse cuts and they just say, “Stop them coming, make room for our own first.”

Toynbee followed up by spending time in Essex with the MP Margaret Hodge, who hosts weekly meetings in Barking for constituents to discuss whatever is on their minds. As she explained, “When the BNP shockingly won 12 council seats, those open-door meetings dealing with everyday grievances saw her make the case and beat them off, so the BNP lost every seat.”

Last week, around 50 constituents turned up, discussing normal concerns – as Toynbee described it, “parking, fly-tipping and houses in multiple occupation crammed with migrants by rogue landlords.” However, at the end of the session, when she asked those who had turned up about the referendum, “the mood changed”:

“We didn’t come to talk about that!” one angry woman said, others agreeing. “We came about parking!” But Hodge insisted, making an eloquent remain case: shrinking services are caused by Tory austerity that halved their council’s budget, more than migrants. The room bristled with antagonism. “Do you want to be governed by Brussels?” one shouted out. “You’re being sold a false prospectus, a bunch of lies,” she said, to no avail. One said: “When I get out at the station, I think I’m in another country. Labour opened the floodgates.”

As Toynbee also noted, although these constituents like Hodge, who is a “well-respected, diligent” MP, “they weren’t listening. She demolished the £350m myth, but they clung to it. She told them housing shortages were due to Tory sell-offs and failure to build but a young man protested that he was falling further down the waiting list, with immigrants put first. Barking’s long-time residents come first, she said, but she was not believed.”

Despite this being a Labour stronghold, the Barking and Dagenham Post found 67% support for Brexit. Toynbee recognised how immigration could be perceived to be to blame for people’s dissatisfactions, despite it not being a true reflection of the situation. She noted, “As high-status Ford jobs are swapped for low-paid warehouse work, indignation is diverted daily against migrants by the Mail, Sun, Sunday Times and the rest. “Fury over plot to let 1.5m Turks into Britain” was Monday’s latest from the Daily Mail,” promoting what, sadly, are its usual lies, as Turks have no interest in joining the EU, and the EU has no intention of allowing Turkey to join. But facts, of course, just get in the way of propaganda.

As Toynbee described it, “This is the sound of Britain breaking.” She continued by imagining two years down the line, after a Brexit win, with people seeing “no change, [the] same migrants, [and the] same sense of powerlessness,” and with, potentially, an economy in recession, and “reliant on City and property bubbles, low skills, low productivity, [and] atrophied public services,” a situation in which Boris Johnson and Michael Gove “risk losing control of the furies they have unleashed,” usurped by “some yet-worse demagogue who calls for throwing out migrants already here.”

Is this a dystopian fantasy? Perhaps. But it’s something I was already thinking before Thomas Mair, a mentally ill man, long interested in fascism, responded to the fever pitch of racism stirred up by those who want us to leave Europe — and particularly, it seems to me, by Nigel Farage’s latest unacceptably racist poster — that he killed the MP Jo Cox, who was, notably, an advocate for the rights of refugees. In court today, when asked his name, Mair responded by stating that his name was “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

I have watched as racism has grown and become acceptable over the last ten years or so — as the ungrounded rumours about preferential treatment for immigrants, in jobs and housing, became louder, even though the housing story has never been true, and, when it comes to employment, it is always the employers, and not those employed, who dictate who gets work and what wages are involved. I watched with rising alarm in the run-up to the 2010 General Election, when Gordon Brown was condemned for having correctly described a woman with whom he had had an encounter in Rochdale, who had discussed being overrun by eastern Europeans, as a “sort of bigoted woman.”

In recent years, however, the racism has crept out of the shadows and is no longer whispered, and I have become wary of getting involved in discussions with people in the street, as often, regardless of people’s background, I end up hearing how immigrants are to blame for everything — often from people who are themselves 2nd generation immigrants. If we vote to leave on Thursday, I genuinely fear that calls for the enforced repatriation of those regarded as unwelcome immigrants will only become louder.

In closing, I can only reiterate how much I believe people have been fooled, blaming immigrants for problems caused by bankers, politicians and the global super-rich. It is true that immigration rates are higher than they have been in a generation, but that is because of our wars and our greed, and because we in Western Europe (in Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Belgium and Scandinavia) are amongst the richest countries in the world. From inside and outside the EU people are drawn to us to seek work, and it is genuinely difficult to see how it could be any different if we left the EU.

London and the south east, for example, have greater work opportunities than almost anywhere else in the world— even if wages and the cost of housing rather take the sheen off the opportunities. If British people are feeling sidelined — and they clearly are, and in significant numbers — the answer is to look at those who claim to be our leaders, and those who regard themselves as the elite, with their arrogance, their greed and their uncontrolled sense of entitlement, and not to engage in the disgraceful scapegoating of people who, fleeing war, violence or broken economies, are not the deserving target of anyone’s anger.

Note: For further analysis, see John Harris’s Guardian article, “Britain is in the midst of a working-class revolt,” and Neil Ascherson’s New York Times article, “From Great Britain to Little England,” and please also watch this powerful video of Professor Michael Dougan, Professor of European Law at the University of Liverpool, lucidly explaining why it is not in Britain’s best interests to withdraw from the EU.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).