on my walk I was shocked by the level of poverty, by the sheer number of homeless people in doorways and parks, and by the high streets of boarded-up shops and pubs, full of payday loan outlets and bookies. People in those former industrial towns spoke of their anger and betrayal, of having being forgotten by Westminster politicians, of their communities having been destroyed as the manufacturing that had sustained them either folded or moved to low-wage economies.Nearly everyone I spoke to in those towns said they were going to vote for Brexit. There was a lot of talk of “taking back control”, and in the context of the industrial wastelands, that sentiment made a lot of sense.
However, this could not be rational politics: 'But the EU issue was, for a majority, a proxy for their pain'. What sort of 'majority' and how he was able to psychoanalyse so many people is a mystery.
He is right to say that:
since then we have had a government paralysed by Brexit, effectively not governing at all.. At a time when politicians should be reaching out to leave voters with concrete proposals for rebalancing our economy, heavily based as it is on services and centred in the south-east, we get a continuation of turbo-charged austerity. In their call for a second referendum, remainers should ask themselves whether the anger that drove the result in June 2016 has been even remotely addressed.
Harrowing details ensue of the results of austerity in Walsall or Stoke:
“The establishment of a neoliberal consensus in Britain has been … an anti-municipal project,” wrote Tom Crewe in a 2016 essay for the London Review of Books. “Austerity is Thatcherism’s logical end-point. People can no longer expect the services they pay for to be run in their interest, rather than the interest of shareholders.”
One person he spoke to:
railed against the amount of money spent on infrastructure projects in the south-east compared with the rest of the country (figures from the IPPR in 2014 showed that every Londoner had £5,426 spent on them annually, compared with £223 in the north-east) and told me he would be voting out in the EU referendum. But that might make the economy even more precarious, I said. He paused for a moment, narrowed his eyes. “If the economy goes down the toilet,” he said, “at least those bastards [in London] will finally know what it feels like to be us.”...
In 1976, three decades of the postwar settlement had seen the UK reach “peak equality”, according to a 2013 economic study, when the country was better off than it had ever been before or since. Forty years of neoliberalism has destroyed that for ordinary people...If you asked the vast majority of people what they want, they would say that essential services should be renationalised (a 2017 YouGov survey found only 25% and 31% of people respectively thought our trains and energy companies should be privately run). They want properly funded health and education services, and to live in a country where they are not afraid to grow old or sick. They want jobs with meaning and value and security. They want to feel that politicians are in charge, not their corporate paymasters. And many, whether progressives like it or not, want a conversation about immigration.
The piece concludes:
until our politicians begin to acknowledge that the globalised neoliberal economic model is a disaster for human beings and the planet we inhabit, we will remain angry and scared and vulnerable to dog whistles.
But then. Then! After all that!:
Brexit will deliver none of this. As driven by the right, it is the final part of the race to the bottom that started 40 years ago.
And Remain -- more global neoliberalism?
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