This was an election about psychology, because, as so often happens in the U.S., people voted against their own interests. You have to ask, what siren song, or magnificent mirage, are they turning toward? And who is supplying the opiates that fuel their absorption in this sinister fantasy?
It is possible that the grievances of Brexit voters have yet been exploited by a more underhanded and malicious group, that counselled hysteria rather than deliberation, and offered utopian delusions, instead of sounds choices.
One article in particular, published in The Guardian on February 25, 2017, raised my hackles when it made the rounds on “The 48%” Facebook page: “Revealed: how U.S. billionaire helped to back Brexit.” The subtitle states: “Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Donald Trump, played key role with ‘sinister’ advice on using Facebook data.”
The article is accessible at: https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit.
Then there is the link between Trump and Farage, only plausible in a world where both are sabotaging treaty relationships between countries in the West to serve Russian interests.
First there were Tony & W. Now it’s Nigel & Donald. The degeneration in the quality of the Anglosphere lends substance to Marx’s dictum: history always repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
The only thing worse than politicians like these, are the people who vote for them, who consent to be used, who look no further for the roots of their problems, than in cheap rhetoric, designed to patronise them. Their weirdly stunted take on politics, is the equivalent of someone sitting in his own car, on a clogged expressway, complaining about the traffic. Yo, genius: you are traffic.
Some of us were astonished that this little island, with its incongruously dense population — one fifth the number of souls as in the U.S., crowded onto 2.64% of the American land mass — would choose to uncouple from the world’s most cohesive trading bloc.
There is no compelling argument for a split, based on financial imperative, or sheer arithmetic, so it is essential to ask why it happened. The EU is very clear about what its goals are. Ours, are a lot more vague. This is no way to undertake a serious negotiation.
As John Major put it, in his speech at Chatham House, on the 28th of February, 2017, “As we saw last June, emotion and national pride can overcome economic self-interest.”
Brexiteers voted to “take back control.” I don’t necessarily believe, as many do, that this can be parsed as a call to reject immigration as such. It was a call to reject a certain kind of immigration.
The British are genuinely magnanimous toward those less fortunate. The Nigerians, Pakistanis, Indians, Jamaicans, and other immigrants from Commonwealth countries, are largely anonymous, and tend to generate less specific resentment than immigrants from the EU, often termed expats, as presumably, we have countries to which to return.
These are the immigrants doing jobs that people traditionally imagine immigrants would want or be wiling to do: driving cabs, running all-night shops that sell liquor or kebabs, staffing care homes for the elderly, or cleaning up in office buildings. I don’t think there’s any deep psychology at work in observing that it is hard to feel threatened by people doing jobs most of us wouldn’t aspire to.
What Brits don’t understand, is the presence of 3.3 million EU citizens here, whereas 1.2 million Britons have left for the continent, leaving a net surplus of 2.1 million from the EU.
But these numbers only reveal the gulf between reality and perception: immigrants from the EU account for less than a third of total immigration, which stands at just over 9 million. (The Economist, April 15, 2017.) Resentment of this fact makes little sense, if logic is the criteria for analysis: no one is suggesting that the Commonwealth be dissolved, or that Commonwealth immigration be radically reduced.
Whereas, seeing a Spanish lady become a corporate lawyer, and lobby for more women to campaign in politics, sets readers of The Daily Mail to wagging, like those little dogs that lorry drivers place on their dashboards. The politics of envy – so long taboo on British soil – have been unleashed on Europeans.
As Gore Vidal remarked, “Narcissism is a quality we attribute to those more attractive than ourselves,” as Miriam Clegg could surely attest.
The most economically productive immigrants have university degrees, if not advanced degrees, and training in a professional field, or at least, vocational skills (like the notorious Polish plumber).
But the most critical distinction is, no matter where immigrants originate, they are upwardly mobile: they are survivors, who are willing to take risks. That puts them in a completely different frame of mind, compared to the locals here. Immigrants are not complacent. Once you have decided to jump out of your comfort zone, you can’t afford to be.
These are the qualities that propel immigrants from the EU to London, many of whom are overqualified in their home countries, where the educational system is stronger than the jobs market: imagine the medical or legal student from Poland or Greece who accepts a job in London, where her skills are valued because her law firm negotiates with European clients, or her patients are, increasingly, other immigrants, who have swelled the ranks of employed workers who need NHS medical care.
According to The Economist, “perhaps 30% of doctors in Britain are non-British.” (April 15, 2017, “A Portrait of Migrantland.”) Take this fact in conjunction with the recorded pattern of strikes initiated by junior doctors on the NHS – a relatively higher proportion of whom are graduates of British medical schools, and British in origin – in response to the government’s plan to offer 7-day services. Junior doctors, in this case, protested their treatment, to which the government responded, that people get sick seven days a week.
Much of the fuss over the referendum focused on immigrant drain on state services. But no one seemed eager to point out that many of the people staffing state services, are immigrants themselves.
“‘We are reliant on foreign labour to deliver public services more cheaply,’ says Jonathan Clifton of IPPR, a think-tank. What will happen if that stream of labour dries up?” This was a question posed by The Economist in an article published on Jul 30th 2016, titled, “Brexit and public services: Somebody call a doctor.”
As The Economist observed, Britons would like to pay American-style taxes, and yet, obtain Scandinavian-style social services. An article titled, “Strike one – Junior doctors walk out over a change in their contracts,” published Jan 14th 2016, opined:
“there is a more serious way in which the public is to blame for the sickness of the health service. The electorate that notionally adores ‘our NHS’ and propels a saccharine song by health workers to the top of the Christmas charts shows remarkably little willingness to pay more in tax towards what remains a relatively cheap system. Without extra money and facing ever wider and wrinklier patients, the NHS must tighten its belt …Pity the well meaning health secretary, pity the hardworking doctors—and blame the sentimental but hypocritical British public.”
I take busses almost every day. Bus drivers in London are like cab drivers in New York: if you get a local, it’s a special day, and not likely in the benevolent sense of the word.
The only time I witnessed an English man driving a bus, he was in such a state of seething road rage, he threw an old lady with a cane physically on the floor. This is what happens when you slam on the gas, then the brakes, because one passenger is taking a little bit longer to reach the door. I was the only person who got up to remonstrate with him.
He offered the sort of hapless half-defensive apology that forms the currency of perpetually frustrated expectations, in which consumers of state-run services expect bad service, and providers deliver it. This is the combination of bitterness, coupled to exhaustion, that led to running charges on horseback between police officers and striking miners in the 1980s.
Without the kindly Sikhs, Jamaicans, Pakistanis, Nigerians, Bulgarians, and Romanians who drive London busses, this society would have declared open season on road rage, long ago.
There are a few basic facts about England that cannot escape you, if you are an expat. First, taxes at the top end of the progressive scale are eye-watering, at 45%. That means forfeiting nearly half your income, while working 12-hour days, and travelling frequently, if you have accepted an offer to transfer to London for work, as I did.
Those jobs, at global corporations, tend to be in the upper ranges of the tax spectrum, and require long hours and frequent travel. This does not make us millionaires; we are not members of the super-rich. As it happens, many Britons have confused us, as a cohort, with our clients and investors. These are the people we work for.
The return on investment, as my former colleagues might have termed it, is laughable. In exchange for 45% of your income, you will be literally gobsmacked at the ineptitude, inefficiency, and generally surly mien of many people who staff the state services that you use. But what will save your sanity, is the presence of other immigrants, who are, in my ten years’ experience, patient, professional, and cheerful.
Deduce from this fact that there is an unstated but palpable bond between expats, that is, those of us who came here to work in global companies, and immigrants, who came here to work in the local economy. This spontaneous pact, that arises between people swimming well beyond their safe harbours, reminds me of New York. It establishes an instantaneous sensation of recognition and reciprocity.
Whereas the locals grumble about getting paid and getting perks and getting breaks, while dodging eye contact, as you attempt to conduct a transaction at the post office, having waited 30 minutes in a queue.
These are the people complaining about their quality of life; the cosmic irony is that, in every measurable field, their quality of life has been improved by EU membership and immigration in general.
My hunch, is that expats occupy a role psychologically akin to that of students at grammar schools.
The re-establishment of grammar schools is a policy that Theresa May has championed, as it offers students at state schools a chance to obtain an education for which they are selected based on ability, and encouraged to compete. Whereas students at “comprehensives” are admitted based on post code, and competition is less intense.
I did not realise how psychologically fraught this issue was, until I happened to hear a radio call-in program devoted to the subject, which asked adults to phone in to discuss their experiences – as children – in regions where grammar schools were running when they were kids. So explosive is the topic, it generated the kind of hushed, half-awed reverence in the station’s commentary, that normally accompanies stories of childhood abuse, when volunteers are asked to provide testimony of ordeals they underwent long ago.
In regions where grammar schools were established, the median income of students selected for admission rocketed ahead of all local comparison. Their trajectory through life was radically altered, and presumably, their own children benefited in turn. The children who were not selected, the ones who were “left behind,” as the callers on the programme expressed it, experienced a slight drop in median income after graduation, over the course of a lifetime, as measured in a longitudinal study.
This is the same phenomenon in evidence when people talk about immigration: a state of near-hysteria totally out of proportion to the facts involved. The use of the phrase, “left behind,” particularly caught my attention, as this, it seems, is how people feel who voted Brexit. Let me suggest a parallel: expats from the EU represent the grammar schools, whereas immigrants from the Commonwealth represent the comprehensives.
This reflects not only the way that immigrants from the Commonwealth improve the tenor of British society today; it is a tribute to the role of the Commonwealth in shoring up England’s economy in the years after World War Two, the conflict that provided the rationale for European integration.
The best analysis of this phenomenon is in Postwar – a History of Europe since 1945, by Tony Judt (p. 357):
“in 1951 Britain was still the major manufacturing centre of Europe, producing twice as much as France and Germany combined. It provided full employment and it did grow, albeit more slowly than everywhere else. It suffered however, from two crippling disadvantages, one a product of historical misfortune, the other self-imposed… the U.K.’s endemic balance of payments crisis was in large measure a result of the debts racked up to pay for the six-year war against Germany and Japan, to which should be added the enormous cost of supporting an effective postwar defence establishment (8.2% of the national income in 1955, against a German outlay of less than half that figure). The pound – still a major unit of international transactions in the 1950s – was overvalued, which made it hard for Britain to sell enough abroad to compensate for sterling’s chronic deficit against the dollar. An island country, utterly dependent on imports of food and vital raw materials, Britain had historically compensated for this structural vulnerability by its privileged access to protected markets in the empire and commonwealth. But this dependence on far-flung markets and resources, an advantage in the initial postwar years as the rest of Europe struggled to recover, became a serious liability once Europe – and especially the EEC zone – took off. The British could not compete with the U.S. and later Germany, in an unprotected overseas market… in some measure the relative economic decline of Britain was thus inevitable. But Britain’s own contribution should not be underestimated. Even before World War Two, Britain’s manufacturing industry had gained a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency, for coasting on past success.”
In other words, the pound sterling was too strong to provide the British manufacturing sector with a global client base outside the Commonwealth, where British goods enjoyed privileged access; but too weak to repay American war loans. It was the Goldilocks of currencies.
It is strange to recall that the American dollar was, once, more highly valued than the pound. When I moved to London, in August 2007, to work at Deutsche Bank, on the trading floor, the dollar was a kind of hapless joke, in the manner of all trades that sour. The exchange ratio of the dollar to the pound was 2:1. I can vividly recall one advertisement for a New York hotel that ran a photo of a glamorous couple, captioned, “Darling, isn’t the exchange rate romantic?”
British trade policy, after the war, was to leverage this country’s privileged access to Commonwealth markets: British Guyana, South Africa, Kenya, Hong Kong, Belize, Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand, Cameroon, Jamaica, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Singapore, Pakistan, Botswana, Ghana, Malawi, Namibia, Rwanda, Uganda, Zambia, Barbados, and Brunei, amongst others.
The choice to baptise this last shadow of the empire, at sunset, in honour of the political settlement instituted by Cromwell, is an intriguing fact. But like the Commonwealth that Cromwell initially favoured, then subsequently disbanded, it was only a temporary measure: a stop-gap.