The Left’s go-to explanation for Brexit, and justification for its resistance to the vote outcome, is that Brexit released the foul odour of uncorked racism (control over immigration figured prominently in leave propaganda) and this invalidates the vote on ‘anti-racism’ grounds. The Left attributes the successful ‘Leave’ vote primarily to a racist opposition to immigration, the result of a people whipped up into a Nuremburg-style passion against foreigners and ethnic scapegoats.
The identitarian Left’s opposition to BREXIT is a political casualty of its anti-racist, ‘Diversity’ obsession. The key issue in the Brexit vote was sovereignty, the question of who should govern, who gets to make the laws governing its citizens, who should have sovereignty over the UK’s own political, economic and social affairs. Should it be the elected British government (put there, and subject to removal, on the ballot-box wishes of the voting public) or unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg which are entirely unaccountable to any popular mandate?
Sovereignty was the umbrella principle behind Brexit. The post-referendum (Ashcroft) survey found that ‘the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’ was the main reason that 49% of ‘Leave’ voters gave for their referendum choice. National laws, most Brexiteers strongly believed, should be made in the nation by the people (through heir elected representatives) that must live by them. Laws should not be made by some remote, unaccountable, bureaucratic body such as the EU.
It was immigration that was the most visible expression of the British people’s desire to take back national democratic control of policy-making. To ‘regain control over immigration’ following the European Union’s abolition of internal borders was the major concern cited by a third of ‘Leave’ voters in the Ashcroft survey. The pro-BREXIT campaign focused on the immigration of low-skilled workers from Eastern Europe and the job theft it promoted - a report commissioned by the Home Secretary confirmed that British employers prefer to hire Poles, Romanians and Lithuanians because they are a lot cheaper, typically being paid 27% less than British workers. Inevitably caught up in this EU-immigration sentiment was the immigration of non-European people (through legal channels and also through fake refugee paths that were directing millions of economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East into an internally borderless Europe. The Brexit referendum was the first chance the British people have ever had to have a direct, democratic say on immigration of any kind and to pass a verdict against porous borders and mass immigration.
Some of the anti-immigration vote may have been baldly racist in motivation but it is possible to have entirely non-racist objections to immigration, such as its effect on jobs, wages, the public purse, the environment, housing, access to schools, health services, etc. What is termed ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment usually peaks when jobs, communities, social amenities and public services provision have been under significant threat from immigration. In the UK, this has been true from as far back as the 16th century when French and Belgian Protestants (the Huguenots) fled to England to escape persecution, through to the 1960’s influx of migrants (for their unskilled, cheap labour) from the newly independent non-white Commonwealth colonial dependencies (India, Pakistan, West Indies, Africa, etc.) and on to the current inundation of migrants from the poorer EU countries and of youths and economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East. The common denominator in opposition to all these waves of immigration to Britain has not primarily been racial bigotry but rather the resultant stress on economic livelihood and living conditions which arises from, or is exacerbated by, large-scale immigration.
If BREXIT was primarily about an underlying racist opposition to migrants, then this should have manifested itself in support for UKIP which is routinely described by the identitarian Left as the political incarnation of racism. UKIP, however, completely disappeared beneath the recent British General Election wave, going from nearly 4 million votes (12.6% of the national total) in 2015 to just 600,000 votes (1.8%) in 2017, its primary EU-divorce agenda achieved.
Even if racism had played the major, decisive role in the Leave vote, the result, however distasteful to the Left, would still be a legitimate democratic outcome. It is true that people of different races generally prefer to club together with similar people, people who share the same language, cultural traditions and behavioural norms. The whole world is ‘racist’ in this way (whites do not have a monopoly on ‘racism’ – blacks, Asians, Hispanics, everyone does it). There is nothing obnoxious about this, certainly nothing unnatural, about this racial tribalism, however much it upsets the multicultural Left.
The lesson for the Left is not to be selective about democratic outcomes it doesn’t like, but to recognise that its maniacally multiculturalist/Open-Borders arguments have failed to make a winning case in the face of the damage to jobs, communities, the environment and free speech that mass, uncontrolled immigration causes or aggravates. Resorting to denigration of voters for being racist, and implementing ‘hate-speech’ laws in obedience to ‘Diversity’, rather than reflecting on the unpopular ideas put forward by the Left is not the same as winning a debate over ideas. Banning an idea is not the same as defeating it. With Brexit, and its core immigration issue, the Left forgot the basic democratic principle of engaging in a struggle of ideas and respecting the democratic outcome.