CommonSpace columnist and Common Weal director Robin McAlpine is conflicted about the EU referendum
I AM not trying to influence your vote in the EU referendum with anything I write here. I'm confident it's too late even if I wanted to. Many of you will not like how I feel today. Some of you will, quite rightly, find hypocrisy here. But I just can't go along with the story about this EU referendum and what it means that many people seem to think I should be telling.
So let me remind you – I wrote an article a few months ago explaining why I feel little more than despair over the entire referendum process (because of the fairly long lead times for Perspectives for which I wrote this it was actually written quite a while before it was published).
Since then, for me, little has changed. The Brexiters are mostly at least as awful (and on plenty occasions even more awful) than I expected. But equally, the Remainers have turned out to be just as banker-friendly and neoliberal as I feared. When it all started we seemed to be offered banker-austerity Europe or reactionary England. That's still the choice.
Let me cut to the chase – there is still no good outcome for me. If I didn't believe in the importance of voting, I'd abstain.
So let me cut to the chase – there is still no good outcome for me. If I didn't believe in the importance of voting, I'd abstain. And since I have no good criteria to make my choice, I'm going to vote Remain. There is one reason and one reason alone for this – and its that having spoken to quite a few Common Weal supporters, it's what most seem to want me to do. So in the absence of a better plan, that's what I'll do.
But there is a very big part of me that wants to not be on the winning side this time. Why? Because if I can't decide who I want to win, I've started thinking about who I want to lose. I suspect you're thinking 'The racists! The xenophobes!'.
Yet I'm starting to take this analysis with an increasingly large pinch of salt. Of course there is racism and xenophobia in the Leave camp. But the way everyone who is tempted by Leave is presented not only as a fool ('why can't they listen to reason!') or a bad 'un ('why are they so horrible!') is quite familiar to me.
Last time I heard it it was me. 'Why can't indy supporters see reason! Why do they hate the English!'. I don't for a second deny that there is clearly racism tied up in the Brexit campaign (much, much more than there was anti-Englishness in the Scottish independence movement).
But hasn't it been alarmingly convenient for a Remain side with barely a positive thing to say about the future to be able to demonise its opponents in such a blanket way. Measured, tempered voices arguing that there is much more to this than racism have been pushed well back in the media agenda.
There is something we need to be honest about – not completely, not entirely, but this is turning into another battle between the powerful and the dispossessed, the middle classes and the working classes.
Because there is something we need to be honest about – not completely, not entirely, but this is turning into another battle between the powerful and the dispossessed, the middle classes and the working classes. As articulated best by Polly Toynbee, the wealthy middle classes 'want their country back'.
Sure they do. Of course they do. Their country is one in which they have power, influence, wealth, comfort, a future for them and their families. Toynbee has written passionately and convincingly on poverty and why it is such a scourge. But then whenever it comes time to vote, she asks us to back the 'sensible option'. Poverty is something to be tackled another day.
I am not for one second naïve about the nature of many pushing Brexit. Paul Mason (one of the few left or liberal Remain supporters who has risen in my estimation during this campaign) is compelling when he points out that this is a 'fake revolt'. It is. And yet it is still a revolt. The working classes don't want Polly's country back, they want a country in which they might have some say, some sense of buy-in, some respect. They may be wrong to see that in a Leave vote, but they are spot on to identify a Remain vote as the opposite.
It is now endlessly fashionable in metropolitan liberal circles to be horrified by the angry English working classes. I'm in a network of well over a thousand left and liberal types across the UK which debated this. Last week, one person sent round a graphic. It was a Venn diagram. One circle had the legend 'loud white men'. The other had the legend 'opinions that matter'. There was very little intersect.
The working classes want a country in which they might have some say, some sense of buy-in, some respect.
My immediate reaction was – what, you think that the many poor, working class white men (and women and poor people who aren't white) don't already know this? You think they haven't realised that a wealthy elite don't think their opinion matters? I found it sneering and contemptuous.
Many liberal types almost seem to think that it is wrong for the working classes to be angry. I think it is virtually their only rational response. Of course, I think they should be angry at the people who really caused their poverty (the 'Davos' elite downwards, not the immigrants), but the political and media classes all agreed together that we should 'draw a line' under anger at bankers, accept the status quo and move on. It's easy not to be angry when you're contemplating upgrading to the new MacBook Pro.
Me? It may horrify you, but the one group in this campaign for whom my affection has grown strongly is the angry English working class. Presented as dumbed-down Little Englanders in the rightwing Leave press and as awful racists by the Remain press, I can't help but feel that still no-one is listening to them.
They have lost before. Most of them have spent their whole lives losing. Many are the people who fought Thatcher, watched their communities fall apart while the rich got richer. They voted New Labour and for their trouble had their children sent off to overseas wars – but got massively deregulated gambling to keep them distracted.
I don't want them to lose again. If we wake up on Friday and it's business as usual, what then? I fear it will be like their final warning – this really isn't your country. You just work here (if you're lucky).
They may be wrong to see that in a Leave vote, but they are spot on to identify a Remain vote as the opposite.
Because have you heard a single, persuasive left Remain voice in all of this? That activist network I mentioned above had another extended debate thread earlier in the referendum. The short version? Yes, there needs to be a really concerted campaign to reform the EU after a Remain vote – but we're all a bit too busy right now.
I am fully expecting leftwing rhetoric about reforming the EU to melt like snow off a dyke – probably by next week. The Guardian will revert back to its 'Let Them Eat Clinton' attitude. You know, the one where hope is unrealistic. Polly Toynbee will probably write a column about EU reform some time after the vote – perhaps two columns.
And then it's back to austerity. Not more or less rightwing despite all that patter which makes it sound like a Brexit is also the election of a far-right parliament rather than the continuation of precisely the far-right parliament we already have. (Indeed, you can argue that the campaign has actually dragged a section of the Tory party to the left.)
Remain has offered nothing. Am I the only person who feels that even Nicola Sturgeon has been channelling a bit of her inner Hillary? Have you heard her say so much as a single word that wouldn't have gained nods of approval round the Goldman Sachs Boardroom?
And in reality, my analysis (not my view or preference, just what I see) is that there may well be more risk from Remain than Leave. If the legitimate anger of the working classes is defeated by the CBI and the City of London and lots of other people with money, you think that's it over?
I don't want them to lose again. If we wake up on Friday and it's business as usual, what then? I fear it will be like their final warning – this really isn't your country. You just work here (if you're lucky).
I actually think that, just like the Scottish referendum, it is probably the winning side who will lose in the long run. The elite Remain will impose TTIP (or something similar) if they win, and they'll get straight on to devoting their effort to make sure Corbyn never gets a chance to change Britain for the better. The angry will get angrier at them.
Whereas if Leave wins, there may be no more scapegoats. Finally they may have to answer for the failure in housing, economic and social security policy in Britain. A big chunk of me thinks that calling their bluff might finish them off.
And one thing about which I'm pretty sure; If you offer me two fights to fight, one is against Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, the other is against the European Central Bank, TTIP, the global banking elite, Osborne, Cameron and all the rest, I'm reasonably confident which one we have the better chance of beating. A leftwing Britain post-Leave may be a stretch, but a leftwing European Union seems like utter fantasy.
I don't want to influence your vote. It would seem irresponsible since I don't really know what to vote myself. I know it is hypocritical that I'm going to vote Remain despite so many of my feelings lying in the other direction. I know every argument against Leave from the left-liberal side and I agree with many. That Farage poster made me sick. I wish he could be prosecuted.
This is a cry of despair. I don't want the Leave vote that's on the table and I don't want the Remain vote that's on the table. Very, very few people have risen in my estimation over the course of this campaign. I'm going to vote to Remain – and, whatever the reality, it feels like a gift to the crowing, wealthy elite and a slap in the face for people who struggle.
What I can say for almost certain is that yet again, one more time, liberal-left Britain has ended up on the opposite side of a debate from the working class. They have offered no vision, no hope, no plan, no future. Right now, they feel finished to me.
So in truth there is only one thing from all of this about which I am even more certain. I want out. I want out of a country that seems only capable of delivering this kind of politics. Until then, whatever the outcome, it looks like our future is going to be a battle between the useless and the ruthless.
Picture courtesy of Robin McAlpine
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