WELL, YOU DID ASK: Why the UK Voted to Leave the EU
MICHAEL ASHCROFT & KEVIN CULWICK
Biteback Publishing, 2016, 124 pages
All the great and good loudly banged on about how disastrously bad BREXIT would be, we are reminded in Well, You Did Ask: Why the UK Voted to Leave the EU, by two prominent Tories, Michael Ashcroft and Kevin Culwick, who run the political polling company, Lord Ashcroft Polls. Every peak global economic body (IMF, OECD, WTO), big-name foreign politicians (Obama, Macron), nearly all business leaders (Richard Branson, et al), endless phalanxes of economic experts (surely an oxymoron up there with ‘military intelligence’ or ‘business ethics’) - all warned that if the 2016 referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union resulted in a vote to Leave, then economic Armageddon in the UK would surely follow, if not followed by a return to the days of dark nationalism and European wars, whilst the racism-obsessed, multiculturalist, liberal Left (is there any other kind these days) chipped in with dire forebodings of a surge of xenophobia and bigotry blighting the ‘Diverse’ wonderland of Old Blighty.
All these doom-laden, scolding, morally preening voices, however, were sensationally ignored as 17.4 million Britons delivered a 52% decision in favour of BREXIT. Why did they do it? Through the Ashcroft surveys and focus groups, a one-word answer emerges - immigration. This should hearten socialist advocates of democracy, immigration-restriction and defence of working class jobs, wages and public services.
The Ashcroft polling revealed that the key motivation behind the decision to exit the EU was ‘immigration and border control’”. One third of Leave voters cited this as the main reason for their ‘Out’ vote. It was topped by the national sovereignty principle that ‘decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK’ (and not undemocratically outsourced to “unelected, remote bodies”) but, as the pollsters conclude, Leave voters also believed that this principle should, “first and foremost”, be applied to immigration. The one other significant complaint about the EU was the imposition of EU ‘rules and regulations’ which was, “at root”, mostly immigration-related as well, for example EU-decreed restrictions on the right of the UK to deport foreign criminals.
There was scant evidence of this popular immigration-restrictionist mood being driven by racism. Immigration was judged, not in terms of skin colour or accent, but the pressure that hordes of immigrants (both EU and non-EU) placed on working class jobs and wages, access to health and other public services, competition for school places, and entitlements to welfare benefits (Britain was consistently seen as a ‘soft touch’ for receipt of social security benefits by Johnny-come-lately immigrants).
As Ashcroft and Culwick write, millions of Leave-inclined, working class Britons were not feeling the much-touted benefits of EU membership, and its feature immigration, whilst suffering all the drawbacks. It was only employers, the immigrants themselves and multiculturalist liberals who were the winners from the EU, a knowledge reinforced by the vociferous hyperbole of the Remainers’ propaganda campaign, the strident vehemence of which simply flagged that they were the ones who stood to lose their immigration gifts if BREXIT got up.
Ashcroft and Culwick allude to the “gilded elite” who so plentifully benefited from EU membership and the immigration bonanza it brought with it but, as dutiful Tories, they do not probe the naked money-making motives of the pro-EU business boosters of immigration who salivate at the profit-pleasing prospect of importing a massive cohort of new consumers (to make up for Britain’s below-replacement fertility rate) buying ever more stuff made with cheaper migrant labour.
Mainstream politicians, too, were devotees of immigration, always hyper-sensitive to the noisy, ‘Diverse’ voting blocs essential to their election prospects. When Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-EU, immigration-restrictionist UKIP, said that importing large numbers of males from “countries where women are, at best, second class citizens was worrying for UK women”, this statement, rather than the mass sexual assaults in Cologne by Muslim immigrants to Germany or the sexual abuse grooming gangs in the UK run by Asian Muslims, was shrilly denounced as “horrific” by the usual multiculturalist suspects. These included those metropolitan liberals who thought that multiculturalism was a ‘force for good’, who split 80%-20% in favour of Remain, whilst those, primarily the British working class, who thought multiculturalism a ‘force for ill’ split by the same margin in favour of Leave.
Also as Happy as Larry with immigration were, naturally enough, the immigrants themselves. Migrants from the less well-off newer members of the EU (for example Poland and former Baltic states such as Latvia) were the most fervently pro-immigration - 70% of migrants from this ‘New Europe’ valued most the freedom to live and work in the UK, at higher wages, with more remittances sent back home. UK citizens from a ‘Diverse’ background were also ardent Remainers – whilst white Britons voted Leave over Remain by six percentage points, 66% of Asians, 70% of Muslims, 70% of Hindus and 75% of black Britons voted to Remain.
Leavers correctly saw the Remainer elite as “not caring about the impact of immigration” on native-born British workers, write Ashcroft and Culwick. The Remainers’ self-interested aloofness from the British labouring class was matched for anti-demos passion by both soft and hard Left with their anti-democratic invocation of the EU to impose EU rules over national government (meaning Tory) policies. In its opposition to BREXIT, the contemporary Left demonstrated undemocratic statist, not democratic socialist, politics.
This continues the recent trend of the Left to renounce its socialist mission to win the political support of its domestic working class, swapping centuries of class-based political tradition for the easy delights of identity politics, strategically redeploying its increasingly marginalised forces to the more politically fertile grounds of laudatory multiculturalism and the simplistic moralism of an identity politics in which ‘race’ has came to supplant ‘class’ as the leftist lingua franca.
The failure by the Left to make political headway with its own (predominantly white) working class has been the result of, amongst other causes, the failure of a race-obsessed, identity-besotted Left to take seriously, indeed to resort to correctively lecturing its traditional political base on, the concerns of that class with immigration and all the related issues it brings in its wake and which directly, and daily, affect their standard of living and quality of life.
The Left’s abdication from the practice and principle of working class democracy on BREXIT (rare indeed was the socialist, like John Pilger, who celebrated the referendum outcome as an explosion of ‘raw democracy’) demonstrated the political decline of a movement that had been founded to express the will of the people against the established political order and now found itself doing the exact opposite.
This is highlighted by the highly valuable insight from the Ashcroft book which shows that, for many voters, particularly Leave voters, the European Union referendum was “only tangentially related to Europe at all”. An Ipsos-MORI poll in 2012, corroborated by a number of other surveys, found that only around 4% of Britons saw EU membership as one of the issues that mattered most but that the issues that did matter (with immigration at the head of an inter-related list including the economy, jobs, wage stagnation, housing affordability and access to over-stressed health and other public services) could all be justifiably related to the narrower and often highly technical question of EU membership.
The referendum was a proxy for an underlying world view of Leave voters, 60% of whom felt that ‘overall, life in Britain today is worse now than thirty years’ ago’ (compared to 75% of Remain voters who agreed that life is better now than then. Whilst a majority of Remainers also felt that the future would be even brighter than the present, 71% of Leavers felt that ‘the way the economy and society are changing, there will be more threats to my standard of living in future’. The past and present has been most visibly marked by mass immigration and the political reign of multiculturalism and, as the rest of the Ashcroft polling indicates, those on the sharp end of the foreign influx and under the heel of the political correctness of ‘Diversity’ were most likely to rebel against their unwanted fate by voting Leave.
The EU referendum burst the dam on these broader, working class political grievances by offering a rare chance to simply and directly determine major public policy – not just on the single issue of EU membership but on a whole suite of related political, economic, social and cultural issues. When asked, in effect, ‘Are you happy with the way things are, and the way they seem to be going?’, the answer came back: ‘Well, since you ask … no’.
To the shame of the modern Left, it has taken a couple of Tory grandees to acknowledge that “there is a wisdom to the electorate that should not be underestimated” and to celebrate the triumph of working class democracy that occurred on 23 June, 2016, when 17.4 million people, overwhelmingly plebs, voted for their class interests against those of their overlords. The BREXIT result? British Working Class 1, Immigration 0.