My loyal reader, not to mention my long-suffering family, will know that I have a very balanced personality in that I have chips on both shoulders. I grew up in a very poor household and, probably because of the person I became and remain, I still carry my past around with me. I’m the working class person who, and hear I quote Seasick Steve, ‘started out with nothin’ and I still got most of it left.’ I bear my working class roots as a badge of dishonour, knowing that where I came from gave me a pathway to a dead end.
I came to find out early that class and wealth meant everything. Those who came from money inevitably ended up with more money than those who came from nothin’. Half a century later, nothing has changed. In many ways, it’s worse.
Take our politics in the UK. There has been precious little change in the demography on the right which represents the rich and the vested interests. The further to the right you go, the greater the accumulation of wealth, assets and influence. There is no greater example than Brexit.
On Saturday, there will be a march in London led by the Leave Means Leave group. They represent the voices of a substantial part of the ruling class, multimillionaire MPs and shysters and hucksters like privately educated former commodities trader Nigel Farage. For them, Brexit represents the low tax, small state, deregulated, unrestrained capitalism they have always dreamed about. They call it ‘taking back control’ yet the reality is their march in London has the implicit aim of these largely white men, who represent an elite force in the land, taking control. Their anti-foreigner rhetoric has certainly resonated with many people who believe that EU workers are the reason for every bad thing in the country today, like a crumbling NHS, underfunded schools and driving down wages, even though little evidence exists to confirm this is the case.
But then, who can blame working class Britain for feeling aggrieved? If the upper class leaders of the hard Brexit campaign tap into those emotions, it was the upper class establishment, like David Cameron and George Osborne, who led the wretched official Remain campaign in 2016, rightly named Project Fear by many, whilst at the same time inflicting severe austerity on working class people who had already suffered most during the worldwide financial crash of 2008. It’s no wonder so many people chose the nuclear option at the referendum. Blaming foreigners, like EU workers and EU officials, had some merit. If they weren’t stealing our jobs, they were driving down wages and stopping us getting school places for our children. It was an easy message to get across to people who had simply had enough of being ignored and giving them someone and something to blame.
If both sides of the Brexit debate, such as it was, revolved around the upper class leaders of Remain and Leave, the Labour Party cannot be absolved of any responsibility for what has gone wrong in our country. Nor can they be regarded in a different light from the establishment who both led and opposed the EU because in many instances they were the same people. Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott (believe it or not) come from the selective grammar schools. Indeed, Corbyn attended one of the most elite grammar schools in the land and Abbott then went to Cambridge university. Everywhere you look in Labour, you see the same people. The organ grinder to Corbyn’s monkey, the Stalinist millionaire Seumas Milne, and who now ‘earns’ well over £100k per annum, hails from wealthy establishment stock (his father ran the BBC for many years), the aristocratic Andrew Drummond-Murray, not to mention his daughter Laura, work closely with Corbyn, the sole owner of Momentum is the former Bennite millionaire Jon Lansman. Corbyn’s grammar school educated son Sebastian is John McDonnell’s chief of staff. And so it goes on. Look around Corbyn’s top table, plus his media outriders like Owen Jones, and you have the Oxbridge set who have little or no understanding of working class people, even though some of them were, at some point, working class. In short, they are every bit as much the establishment as the likes of Cameron, Osborne, Farage, Johnson, Rees-Mogg et al. Talk about elites. They are everywhere. And they are all pro Brexit.
Corbyn is, like Farage, a hard Brexiter. He doesn’t like to be reminded of it because many of Labour’s members are remainers, but let us not ignore that simple fact. That’s why he went to Morecambe last Saturday on the day of the People’s Vote march. More than anything, Corbyn was, and still is, a disciple of Tony Benn, yet another aristocratic comrade who attended the best private schools and university and Benn, that great rebel, was as pro Brexit as Enoch Powell whom he greatly admired and was content to share numerous anti-Common Market platforms with him in the 1975 referendum when we actually joined. To be fair to Powell, and in contrast to Farage, he was a towering intellectual and the only things they shared were bigotry and xenophobia, with a little racism thrown in.
Corbyn’s version of Labour, with specific reference to Brexit, represents disaster socialism, although that remains as absent from their arguments as any real policy at all. Their current strategy is to stand to one side and watch the Conservatives mess it all up and to avoid taking any of the blame when things go horribly wrong, as they surely will. Then, they hope and believe, Corbyn’s Rag, Tag and Bobtail outfit will step into the breach and introduce socialism in one country. And they are more than happy for a hard Brexit to take place believing, with some justification it must be said, that the country will all but implode if this happens.Our current leaders are taking us for fools.
We really are between a rock and a hard place in our country. On the right we have the disaster capitalists of Farage, Johnson et all and on the left the disaster socialists of Corbyn and the comrades. In all points between from mainstream left to the mainstream right we watch this nightmare unfold, in the knowledge that any form of Brexit will make the country poorer, weaker, isolated and even more divided than we are now.
I never lost my working class roots and never will. I don’t like being talked down to, and patronised by politicians, and that’s exactly how I feel when I am addressed by the likes of men of privilege like Farage and Corbyn and their surprisingly shared vision of a post Brexit Britain, albeit with different aims and objectives. Both our children and grandchildren will one day look back at this period in history where the people were encouraged to try self-immolation in order to somehow ‘take back control’ and wonder what the hell we were thinking about.
I have always seen Brexit as representing a long term decline in our country and I have seen little to change my view, except to say that the inadequacies of our politicians is likely to accelerate that process. And I am no doubt that the working class, of which I am a lifelong member, will suffer the brunt of the pain that is to come. The real establishment will barely notice the difference.
