I just visited my family in London, coincidentally arriving two days after the Brexit vote. I’m writing to share my attempt to understand why the UK voted to leave Europe, and think about what we can learn from it. I started out viewing the Leave voters as incoherent racists, but ended up understanding a lot of their anger.
Most Remain-ers I talked to viewed the Leave voters simply as racist bigots. One friend called Brexit a “fascist coup.” At the 50,000-strong anti-Brexit rally in London on July 2, a sign referred to Leavers as “racists et al.” A little girl wore a hand-painted dress accusing the Brexit campaigners: "You played the race card; you stole my future."
Horrifying racism was a big feature of the Leave campaign, buttressed by horrifying racism in the UK tabloids (sample headline: “Migrants get extra benefits for polygamous marriages”). And victory seemed to bring racists out into the open (reports of racist attacks increased five-fold). A friend told me he’d been harassed by teenagers with shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” He’s bearded and Italian, and they evidently decided that he was Muslim. Another friend’s Palestinian housemate was told to “go home” by two young white men as he smoked a cigarette outside his door in North London.
So the Brexit vote was partly fueled by racism, but that’s not a complete explanation. Most Leave voters, in the news stories I read, talked about inequality. The two issues are tied together: inequality fuels racism, and racism also fuels inequality, in that it can be mobilized by the likes of Donald Trump the UK’s Nigel Farage to pit one group of oppressed people against another.
After the Brexit vote, I wanted to understand why people in Sunderland and Salford—mostly-white Northern towns and former liberal bastions—voted Leave. These voters are the equivalent of America’s rust belt workers, and are often former union members. They feel deserted by the UK’s Labour party, which shifted away from its blue-collar roots in the 1990s, under Blair, to become the party of educated white-collar workers and globalization. Many of these former Labour voters turned to the right-wing, dog-whistling UK Independence Party, which calls for an end to free trade and immigration. In other words, these are exactly the sort of blue-collar voters that Trump is now wooing in the US.
“If you've got money, you vote in…if you haven't got money, you vote out,” said a Leave voter from the northern city of Manchester.
“We’re segregated from the south, and the north is a barren wasteland,” said an 18-year-old Leave voter in Sunderland to the NYTimes. “It’s us against them.”
“Leaving the EU might make my life shit, but it’s shit anyway,” said Martin Parker, an unemployed 62-year-old Londoner who voted Leave. “I’ve got nothing to lose.”
Across England, you could predict the Brexit result based on average after-tax income. In Sunderland, the Northern town where 61% voted Leave, average income is around $17,500 dollars. In the wealthy London borough of Westminster, after-tax income is $56,200, and 70% voted to stay in Europe.
Even within London, which voted 60% Remain, the vote was split along economic lines. Parts of East London, which is poorer, voted to Leave. In the east London borough of Barking and Dagenham, post-tax income is around $21,700, and 62.8% voted Leave. Like Northern Brexiters, these southern Leave voters were often protest voting against economic decline and austerity, things that have more to do with Britain’s conservative government than with Europe.
As I walked along the River Thames, with moneyed London all around me, I could understand the Leave voters’ resentment. The gleaming bars along the South Bank, filled with sleek pink-faced men in pastel shirts, looked like early scenes from a movie about revolution.
The big banks clearly believe that the Brexit vote is a protest against inequality. “Brexit is thus far the biggest electoral riposte to our age of inequality,” Bank of America strategists told the Guardian. “Our secular conclusion is that investors must start to anticipate new populist policy responses.” The bankers’ worry is that Brexit will prompt Western governments to “take up or intensify the battle against inequality by redistributing income (through taxation and regulation) from capital to labour.”
The working and lower-middle class, in both the U.S. and U.K., are quite literally the world’s economic losers in the last two decades of globalization, as this now-much-shared Washington Post graph shows.
These voters don't want to be told to suck it up and accept globalization as the lesser evil, as Obama urged last week. Obama’s pro-globalization stance seems likely to repel blue-collar voters and make them more easily swayed by Trump’s rhetoric about ending free trade.
Democrats don’t talk much about neoliberalism and globalization as evils, but the Brexit vote suggests that they should. These are the forces that powered the Brexit vote and are fueling Trump’s success, according to Thomas Frank. Because Brexit could happen here—only it won’t be Brexit, it will be something even worse.
I’d love to have a conversation in the comments about what this means and what we should do about it.