UK Brexit: Reaction rebranded as the "will of the people"

27 June 2016. A World to Win News Service. By Robert Borba. On 23 June, a referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union resulted in a victory for Leave. Within hours, Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, who called the referendum and led the campaign to stay in the EU in opposition to a large chunk of his own party, announced his resignation. Within days an internal challenge was mounted to Labour Party head Jeremy Corbyn, who also supported the Remain campaign. As one veteran BBC news presenter remarked, Britain’s two main governing parties have alternately experienced meltdowns in the face of electoral defeat, but never before at the same time. The disarray in Westminster is unprecedented. And the shock waves are spreading, hitting the European Union and beyond.

The vote in this referendum is being widely hailed in the UK media as a victory of "the people versus the establishment". The leaders of the Leave campaign triumphantly proclaimed, "We have got our country back". Britain’s largest circulating newspaper, The Sun, splashed "Independence Day" across its front page. Pundits proclaimed that Britain is "once again an independent, self-governing democracy", all thanks to "the people’s verdict" – "The people have spoken".

Actually, the people have been deceived, manipulated and deeply degraded by both sides. A bad wind is rising, an unleashing of undisguised backwardness, as it is in the "advanced" imperialist countries in general. Already people – especially women and girls – suspected of being insufficiently English are being harassed and sometimes worse in public spaces. This is hardly new but it is now reaching new depths as bullies apparently feel that the referendum has ratified their birthright as self-identified "white" men – who gets to be considered "white" in the UK is a contested question – to take out their resentment at the way they have been treated on those they consider inferior. This is what the promised "sovereignty" looks like on the street.

While the referendum arose from very real disagreements among the country's rulers about how to deal with changes in the UK's position in the world and the world itself, and intense political rivalries, the way the campaign was waged from the start by both sides made it a means of engaging millions who have become increasingly alienated and angry at the status quo and bringing them back into the political processes that have long served to legitimate capitalist rule.

It is the workings of the global imperialist system itself that have been driving profound changes in Britain – the hollowing out the industrial economy that offered relative stability for many years; the undermining of the situation of millions in the middle strata; changes in women's position and in the country's ethnic composition; the deterioration of public services – all of this has created a great sense of unease and alienation. The values and traditions most people live by – the ideological glue that has held Britain's capitalist society together – have been brought smack up against a changing material reality. The Leave campaign offered people a simple solution: leave the European Union, stop immigration and go back to the glory days of the British Empire.

The Leave campaign tapped deep reservoirs of nostalgia for a return to some kind of Agatha Christie-like Middle England, a time when "a man's home was his castle", when “people of color knew their place”, and women of all classes were supposed to serve their husbands, whether they were middle class "homemakers" or worked in factories. Those values are fully on display in The Sun, where women are always either princesses or body parts, while the pages of more sophisticated media like The Independent reveal both an uneasiness with these relations and a profound inability to get beyond them. An era when the most naked racism was considered socially acceptable, a justification for the fact that hundreds of millions of people around the world suffered under Britain’s colonial yoke.

In fact, the basis for whatever stability and petty privileges enjoyed outside of elite circles was and still is Britain's place among the handful of imperialist nations where the world's wealth is concentrated. Representatives of a class of exploiters who have miseducated, mistreated and misused millions of ordinary masses here for generations are now harnessing their anger and bitterness in an effort to turn them into little storm-troopers against immigrants who in fact are working the worst-paying, dirtiest most menial jobs.

Let's consider this claim that the Leave campaign represented the "people against the establishment". Or as the Daily Mail, which lives and breathes "Britain first" chauvinism of the worst order, from its support for fascism in the 1930s through to its support for apartheid in South Africa, trumpeted on its Sunday front page, "It was the day the quiet people of Britain rose up against an arrogant political class and a contemptuous Brussels elite".

It is true that the campaign was marked by fury and bitterness directed at "arrogant politicians" and "elite forces" who are indeed "contemptuous" of the hardships and sufferings of ordinary people. But what was the content of the campaign? What was shaping and directing all this anger and alienation? Against whom and for what end?

Leave hammered at the theme that the Remain forces didn’t really believe in the British people – "They don’t think the British people can go it alone", "They don’t think we’re good enough". Nigel Farage, head of the UK Independence Party and a major Leave campaigner, ranted that immigrants were "stealing British jobs" and "swamping our public services". But how was this answered by Remain leader Cameron, whose government has brought about almost seven years of austerity budgets, deteriorating social services and deepening inequality, not to mention ongoing wars for empire in the Middle East? By framing the issue in terms of whether immigrants made a net contribution or were a net drain on the British economy. In other words, within the very same framework as Leave, teaching people to look at their fellow human beings, immigrants, solely on the basis of "what’s in it for us Brits". When the terms of debate are focused so tightly on chauvinist terrain, then why go for the watered-down patriotism of Cameron and Remain? Why not go instead with the undiluted chauvinist calls of Leave and its virulent racist leaders like Farage?

This was not some people's uprising from below – far from it. Boris Johnson, the Tory leader who served two mandates as mayor of London, is now the leading candidate to become the next prime minister. Almost half the ruling Tory Party Members of Parliament (MPs), including senior leaders and cabinet ministers, campaigned to Leave. UKIP, which promotes "free enterprise" and privatisation and has support from major business figures, won the largest share of the vote in the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, ahead of both Labour and the Tories. The Guardian reported that the newspapers supporting Leave have four times the circulation of those supporting Remain. And what role do these mouthpieces of powerful reactionary capitalists like the billionaire Rupert Murdoch serve, other than to shape and mould public opinion in the service of the capitalist system?

The referendum was also highly revealing about the character of the Labour Party and its new, supposedly radical leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Labour’s arguments for remaining in the EU focused on two points: first, that we need to "cooperate with our neighbours" to face urgent problems like the environmental crisis that are increasingly global in scope; and second, that the EU offers protection of workers’ rights against the Tory government. The first of these arguments ran straight up against the harsh reality that these European "neighbours" in fact form an equally reactionary and predatory imperialist bloc, which has been sharply exposed by recent events, including most recently by erecting borders against millions of desperate migrants fleeing the wars and chaos brought on to no small extent by the big European powers themselves. And as for the second argument, here too Labour framed its arguments exclusively in terms of "what’s in it for us Brits", now in the form of "us British workers". Again, putting the argument in these terms meant arguing with aggressive patriots over who’s most patriotic – an argument that the "Britain first" Leave campaigners were ultimately to win.

Leave promised that Britain freed of the shackles of the Brussels bureaucracy will experience unprecedented prosperity. At the core of Leave’s promises of a better life outside the EU is targeting immigrants as a source of every woe facing people. But it is the workings of the capitalist system and a state that reflects and reinforces that which is responsible for all this suffering, not immigrants. And will Britain being outside the EU change any of that? No. All that has changed is that the reactionary "my country first" nationalism that has been rising in Britain and throughout the imperialist countries has been given new vigour. Now that Leave has won, they will be expected to deliver on their promises – while all they'll actually be able to deliver is more of the same. And then where will all the anger and frustration be at that turn?

The powerful forces unleashed by the global imperialist system are undermining the stability and order of generations of capitalist rule in Britain and more broadly in unprecedented ways. The same upsurge that has carried Britain outside the EU may well carry Scotland out of the United Kingdom, and could even trigger the unravelling of the European Union itself. The same forces that have given impetus to the reactionary jingoism that has been enshrined by this referendum open up a radically different potential.

As the traditional political parties are thrown into chaos, as the status quo loses its hold on people and millions grow increasingly frustrated and angry at the workings of bourgeois democracy, there are unprecedented possibilities for bringing out the need for a radical solution to all this: the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order and the establishment of a new revolutionary state that could mobilise people to begin to solve the problems facing humanity and overcome the divisions and inequalities ravaging humanity. In this light, the online petition seeking a new referendum signed by over 3 million people in a few days misses the point – what is needed is not more better voting, but overthrowing the structures of domination that invariably render elections a tool of a reactionary elite.

(For more on why this is happening now, see "Brexit shocks the system" at revcom.us).