What did the late A.A. Gill think about Brexit?
“It was the woman on Question Time that really did it for me. She was so familiar. There is someone like her in every queue, every coffee shop, outside every school in every parish council in the country. Middle-aged, middle-class, middle-brow, over-made-up, with her National Health face and weatherproof English expression of hurt righteousness, she’s Britannia’s mother-in-law. The camera closed in on her and she shouted: “All I want is my country back. Give me my country back.”
It was a heartfelt cry of real distress and the rest of the audience erupted in sympathetic applause, but I thought: “Back from what? Back from where?”
Wanting the country back is the constant mantra of all the outies. Farage slurs it, Gove insinuates it. Of course I know what they mean. We all know what they mean. They mean back from Johnny Foreigner, back from the brink, back from the future, back-to-back, back to bosky hedges and dry stone walls and country lanes and church bells and warm beer and skittles and football rattles and cheery banter and clogs on cobbles. Back to vicars-and-tarts parties and Carry On fart jokes, back to Elgar and fudge and proper weather and herbaceous borders and cars called Morris. Back to victoria sponge and 22 yards to a wicket and 15 hands to a horse and 3ft to a yard and four fingers in a Kit Kat, back to gooseberries not avocados, back to deference and respect, to make do and mend and smiling bravely and biting your lip and suffering in silence and patronising foreigners with pity.
We all know what “getting our country back” means. It’s snorting a line of the most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia. The warm, crumbly, honey-coloured, collective “yesterday” with its fond belief that everything was better back then, that Britain (England, really) is a worse place now than it was at some foggy point in the past where we achieved peak Blighty. It’s the knowledge that the best of us have been and gone, that nothing we can build will be as lovely as a National Trust Georgian country house, no art will be as good as a Turner, no poem as wonderful as If, no writer a touch on Shakespeare or Dickens, nothing will grow as lovely as a cottage garden, no hero greater than Nelson, no politician better than Churchill, no view more throat-catching than the White Cliffs and that we will never manufacture anything as great as a Rolls-Royce or Flying Scotsman again.
The dream of Brexit isn’t that we might be able to make a brighter, new, energetic tomorrow, it’s a desire to shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday. In the Brexit fantasy, the best we can hope for is to kick out all the work-all-hours foreigners and become caretakers to our own past in this self-congratulatory island of moaning and pomposity.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration of the Brexit position, then just listen to the language they use: “We are a nation of inventors and entrepreneurs, we want to put the great back in Britain, the great engineers, the great manufacturers.” This is all the expression of a sentimental nostalgia. In the Brexiteer’s mind’s eye is the old Pathé newsreel of Donald Campbell, of John Logie Baird with his television, Barnes Wallis and his bouncing bomb, and Robert Baden-Powell inventing boy scouts in his shed.
All we need, their argument goes, is to be free of the humourless Germans and spoilsport French and all their collective liberalism and reality. There is a concomitant hope that if we manage to back out of Europe, then we’ll get back to the bowler-hatted 1950s and the Commonwealth will hold pageants, fireworks displays and beg to be back in the Queen Empress’s good books again. Then New Zealand will sacrifice a thousand lambs, Ghana will ask if it can go back to being called the Gold Coast and Britain will resume hand-making Land Rovers and top hats and Sheffield plate teapots.
There is a reason that most of the people who want to leave the EU are old while those who want to remain are young: it’s because the young aren’t infected with Bisto nostalgia. They don’t recognise half the stuff I’ve mentioned here. They’ve grown up in the EU and at worst it’s been neutral for them.
The under-thirties want to be part of things, not aloof from them. They’re about being joined-up and counted. I imagine a phrase most outies identify with is “women’s liberation has gone too far”. Everything has gone too far for them, from political correctness — well, that’s gone mad, hasn’t it? — to health and safety and gender-neutral lavatories. Those oldies, they don’t know if they’re coming or going, what with those newfangled mobile phones and kids on Tinder and Grindr. What happened to meeting Miss Joan Hunter Dunn at the tennis club? And don’t get them started on electric hand dryers, or something unrecognised in the bagging area, or Indian call centres , or the impertinent computer asking for a password that has both capitals and little letters and numbers and more than eight digits.
We listen to the Brexit lot talk about the trade deals they’re going to make with Europe after we leave, and the blithe insouciance that what they’re offering instead of EU membership is a divorce where you can still have sex with your ex. They reckon they can get out of the marriage, keep the house, not pay alimony, take the kids out of school, stop the in-laws going to the doctor, get strict with the visiting rights, but, you know, still get a shag at the weekend and, obviously, see other people on the side.
Really, that’s their best offer? That’s the plan? To swagger into Brussels with Union Jack pants on and say: “ ’Ello luv, you’re looking nice today. Would you like some?”
When the rest of us ask how that’s really going to work, leavers reply, with Terry-Thomas smirks, that “they’re going to still really fancy us, honest, they’re gagging for us. Possibly not Merkel, but the bosses of Mercedes and those French vintners and cheesemakers, they can’t get enough of old John Bull. Of course they’re going to want to go on making the free market with two backs after we’ve got the decree nisi. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Have no doubt, this is a divorce. It’s not just business, it’s not going to be all reason and goodwill. Like all divorces, leaving Europe would be ugly and mean and hurtful, and it would lead to a great deal of poisonous xenophobia and racism, all the niggling personal prejudice that dumped, betrayed and thwarted people are prey to. And the racism and prejudice are, of course, weak points for us. The tortuous renegotiation with lawyers and courts will be bitter and vengeful, because divorces always are and, just in passing, this sovereignty thing we’re supposed to want back so badly, like Frodo’s ring, has nothing to do with you or me. We won’t notice it coming back, because we didn’t notice not having it in the first place.
Nine out of 10 economists say ‘remain in the EU’
You won’t wake up on June 24 and think: “Oh my word, my arthritis has gone! My teeth are suddenly whiter! Magically, I seem to know how to make a soufflé and I’m buff with the power of sovereignty.” This is something only politicians care about; it makes not a jot of difference to you or me if the Supreme Court is a bunch of strangely out-of-touch old gits in wigs in Westminster or a load of strangely out-of-touch old gits without wigs in Luxembourg. What matters is that we have as many judges as possible on the side of personal freedom.
Personally, I see nothing about our legislators in the UK that makes me feel I can confidently give them more power. The more checks and balances politicians have, the better for the rest of us. You can’t have too many wise heads and different opinions. If you’re really worried about red tape, by the way, it’s not just a European problem. We’re perfectly capable of coming up with our own rules and regulations and we have no shortage of jobsworths. Red tape may be annoying, but it is also there to protect your and my family from being lied to, poisoned and cheated.
The first “X” I ever put on a voting slip was to say yes to the EU. The first referendum was when I was 20 years old. This one will be in the week of my 62nd birthday. For nearly all my adult life, there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t been pleased and proud to be part of this great collective. If you ask me for my nationality, the truth is I feel more European than anything else. I am part of this culture, this European civilisation. I can walk into any gallery on our continent and completely understand the images and the stories on the walls. These people are my people and they have been for thousands of years. I can read books on subjects from Ancient Greece to Dark Ages Scandinavia, from Renaissance Italy to 19th-century France, and I don’t need the context or the landscape explained to me. The music of Europe, from its scales and its instruments to its rhythms and religion, is my music. The Renaissance, the rococo, the Romantics, the impressionists, gothic, baroque, neoclassicism, realism, expressionism, futurism, fauvism, cubism, dada, surrealism, postmodernism and kitsch were all European movements and none of them belongs to a single nation.
No time for walls: the best of Europe, from its music and food to IM Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, depends on an easy collision of cultures
There is a reason why the Chinese are making fake Italian handbags and the Italians aren’t making fake Chinese ones. This European culture, without question or argument, is the greatest, most inventive, subtle, profound, beautiful and powerful genius that was ever contrived anywhere by anyone and it belongs to us. Just look at my day job — food. The change in food culture and pleasure has been enormous since we joined the EU, and that’s no coincidence. What we eat, the ingredients, the recipes, may come from around the world, but it is the collective to and fro of European interests, expertise and imagination that has made it all so very appetising and exciting.
The restaurant was a European invention, naturally. The first one in Paris was called The London Bridge.
Culture works and grows through the constant warp and weft of creators, producers, consumers, intellectuals and instinctive lovers. You can’t dictate or legislate for it, you can just make a place that encourages it and you can truncate it. You can make it harder and more grudging, you can put up barriers and you can build walls, but why on earth would you? This collective culture, this golden civilisation grown on this continent over thousands of years, has made everything we have and everything we are, why would you not want to be part of it?
I understand that if we leave we don’t have to hand back our library ticket for European civilisation, but why would we even think about it? In fact, the only ones who would are those old, philistine scared gits. Look at them, too frightened to join in.”
………………………………….
A.A Gill. The Times. 2016
Brilliant. My views expressed a million times better than I ever could. He was something else, old AA. He upset people sometimes but I have a number of his books and they’re all superb.
Excallent article. Thanks for sharing. “Back to gooseberries not avocados.” Brilliant.
The only tricks he missed were the 5 yard line and the 25.
What a superb piece, and what a reminder of the profound stupidity behind (PSB) the approaching lemming leap.
I remember reading this at the time and shar8ng it on Facebook. It summed up my thoughts very well, and that includes justifiable accusations of condescension.
Thanks Mike. The best piece of writing I will read this week. And all so painfully true.
“Bisto nostalgia”
Mr Gill had a certain way with words – the world is a poorer place without him.
Bisto Nostalgia: TMFTL
Oh my, that’s good!
Listening to Leavers, it occured to me ages ago that there were myriad reasons to vote that way and a lot of it driven by the way people view our nation through the prism of films and TV that feed into this notion that we are best off when alone and facing down Johnny Foreigner. How many more films do we need about bloody Churchill and the 2nd World War..? All that cosy Sunday night TV set in the 50s drives me mad.
I’d conjure up a profound answer for you, but Dad’s Army is on in five minutes.
That piece is more than two years old. It predicts the near future pretty well, about the divorce especially.
I despair.
It resonates very much with me.
It has often been said that one of the motivations for voting Leave was immigration, which may very well be true. But that said, anyone I know who voted leave has not felt any impact from immigration, save for employing builders or decorators or cleaners or mechanics who are from the continent. Generally they are very pleased with the work done.
Gill’s article does go a long way towards explaining probably why they voted leave.
My sister lives in Harlow in Essex and she definitely voted Leave because of immigration. Give her a few wines and she goes into full Daily Heil Islamophobe. I have pointed out that Leaving the EU will make no difference, making all the arguments that immigration brings benefits to the economy, but she insists they are here to milk the benefit system and send it all abroad. Yes, really.
Brilliant.
Never shared anything on Facebook before but I have now.
Just shared it also. While there I saw that a ‘friend’ has posted an anti Eu/pro-brexit post. This is the same bloke who tells everyone that his five year plan is to retire to live in Spain! You can’t make this shit up!
Me too!
Thanks @mike_h post of the week.
Had a ‘friend’ who said the same.
Would move back to Spain, having lived there for ten years previously!
An actual friend voted leave ‘because of immigration ‘. His mother is German.
He obviously means those ‘other’ immigrants
At the time of the referendum I worked with an immigrant Muslim woman. She’d regularly tell me of incidents where she felt she’d been the victim of racism, and I genuinely sympathised with her because it was an experience so alien to my own.
She voted Leave because there were too many Romanians in her part of the city.
My Irish mum came over to the UK a little before WWII and frequently said I’d never believe the suspicion and dislike held towards the Irish then. She also had to put up with overt anti-Irish remarks at her last job before retirement in the ’80s, from a woman whose son was in the Army serving in Northern Ireland.
She’d been educated in the basics only, by nuns in a convent school back then, so naturally she never liked Jews very much. To her credit she had a healthy dislike of nuns, priests and religion in general and never set foot in a church again, once she’d left Ireland.
She was rather suspicious and standoffish toward Blacks and Indians etc. and frequently came out with unconsciously racist things about them, though she was never nasty to the faces of those she was prejudiced against, always polite.
Just a typical product of her upbringing and poor education.
If she’d still been alive at the time of the referendum, she might well have voted leave. No doubt she’d have regretted it by now though, with all the crap about the border now.
Great bit of reading.
A A Gill was (almost) insufferable and smug when interviewed in those talking heads things he always popped up on.
But I’ve often enjoyed his writing – not read that particular piece (despite it being 2+ years old) – it’s a pretty forthright argument.
Pretty much my feelings too – I just can’t articulate them as well as Mr Gill did
Me too: I didn’t like his image but he could pen a purple prose like no-one else. His book about the demon booze is particularly good, Pour Me.
Wow, that is indeed a superb bit of writing. I think might be the best articulation out there of how many feel about the whole leave calamity and the people who voted for it.
The only part I felt was a sloppy generalisation was the suggestion that ‘it’s the old people’ who are to blame for brexit. I kind of agree, but not really. I know plenty of young people who want to leave and on this very site we have lots of ‘oldies ‘ who want to remain.
Agreed, I’m generally very sensitive to lazy generalisations about age, and we now know having had the results analysed that level of education is as big a determinant as age. I read an equally and not quite as good (but still interesting) piece in the New Statesman from Gloria de Piero which I’ll put in a separate comment (below – apologies for its length).
How do we make sense of Brexit and how should we respond to the 2016 referendum result? If Labour doesn’t identify the concerns of those who voted against the status quo and take steps to address the discontent and disaffection that lay behind their decision to do so, there is a risk it will not govern for a long time. I represent a Labour seat where nearly 70 per cent of people voted Leave and I wanted to understand why so many did. I spoke to seven people from my Ashfield constituency who opted to exit the EU – one person from each age group between twenties and seventies. I wanted to hear the stories behind the statistics and identify some common themes that might help Labour reconnect with our natural base.
It is worth putting the Brexit vote in context first, and that starts by acknowledging that the trends that resulted in a narrow win for Leave are deep rooted. For anyone who had been paying attention, the shock result was not a bolt from the blue, but a reckoning for which we should have been prepared.
It is nearly 14 years since Labour last won a general election. We made some incredible gains in 2017, winning Canterbury and Kensington for the first time, but election night in the former Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfields told a different story: we lost Mansfield and North East Derbyshire and the biggest Tory swings came in my own Ashfield seat and Dennis Skinner’s Bolsover. Lazy thinking put the loss of these heartland seats down to Brexit or Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, but the left’s decline with many traditional voters had been coming for some time. My current majority of 441 looks quite healthy compared to my 2010 majority of 192.
In 2010, while I celebrated my first election victory by a tiny margin, I watched as a swathe of nearby coalfield seats fell to the Tories – Cannock Chase, Sherwood, Amber Valley and Erewash – all former mining areas that had returned Labour MPs since 1992 or 1997. That was long before Brexit or Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise leadership victory.
Some blame the financial crash for the loss of working-class support, but as Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin point out in their excellent new book National Populism – The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, in strong and growing economies like Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland many of the most successful national populist movements (characterised by more restrictive immigration policies but also a more responsive political system and more equal economic settlement) emerged as major political forces long before the financial crash.
In the UK, the clearest illustration of a move towards a form of national populism came in the form of the shock 2016 referendum result.
Robert Peston tried to make sense of this in his recent book WTF?. In a letter to his late father, Peston writes: “We fucked up, didn’t we, Dad – all of us who prospered in a borderless world for capital and labour. We ignore the complaints of those whose way of life was being dismantled.”
I know what he means. I spent most of my childhood in poverty. I was very aware of that poverty, and life was miserable because of it. My parents put everything into providing an escape route – borrowing library books, reading, trips to museums – anything that might lead to better life. And it worked. I became a Labour Party activist as a teenager, went to the University of Central England and then studied for a Masters degree at Birkbeck University while working at the BBC. By the time I was 30 I was a reporter at GMTV and a member of the parliamentary group of lobby correspondents.
In 2010 Geoff Hoon resigned his seat abruptly, I left my job just as abruptly, and convinced Ashfield Labour members to select me as their parliamentary candidate. Then the door knocking began and it hit me like a truck. The conversations I had been having in London bore little or no resemblance to conversations in the former Nottinghamshire coalfield seat. I remember telling a friend in the lobby who called me to ask how it was going that none of the things we talked about in London were remotely of interest here. Without knowing or realising it – and though I always described myself throughout my time in London as working class – I now realise that my outlook had totally changed. I can never thank the people of Ashfield enough for bringing me back to reality.
The debate following our decision to leave the European Union reminded me of this chasm. Many said people voted to leave because they were too stupid; others said they had been conned; some even accused them of racism – even though one in three non-whites voted to leave. The apparent lack of will to engage with the fact people voted Leave because they may have liked what they heard, worried me and when some on the left made these points, it made me deeply uncomfortable. They are talking about the voters that Labour needs to attract in order to win again, most of whom are the very people they came into politics to represent.
Barbara, a 69-year-old pensioner and former local government employee, approached me in a supermarket surgery to give me a piece of her mind. I visited her at home the day after a particularly provocative Polly Toynbee column had been published in the Guardian. Barbara told me that Toynbee had said that there should be a second referendum because “there will be more Remainers now because those who voted Leave will be dead.”
“How evil!” Barbara exclaimed angrily. This argument is often invoked by Remainers, in public and private, but imagine how it sounds to those like Barbara who voted Leave.
I know that many Brexit voters have never and will never vote Labour. These were not the pool of voters I was interested in. I wanted to understand why so many working people backed Brexit and I decided to speak at length to working-class voters with some Labour voting history. I wanted to get beneath the analysis and statistics that show working-class discontent and hear the personal stories to help the Labour Party reconnect with the people who feel they don’t have a voice in parliament. According to Eatwell and Goodwin, 58 per cent of those who voted to leave also say that politicians don’t listen to people like them.
One in four Brexit voters had a degree, whereas a whopping 80 per cent of British graduates aged under 34 with a degree voted to Remain in the EU. Only 37 per cent of the same age group without a degree did the same.
I searched out voters in Ashfield who do not have a degree and who voted Leave. I sat down with Paige, Natalie, Julie, Mark, Barbara and Tony.
I had little idea about their lives before we talked, but many common themes emerged. All identified strongly as working class and two had little or no voting history until they cast their vote in the referendum. Five out of six had left school with no formal qualifications.
Individual human stories are never scientific but they do help us to understand the problems voters face and how we put them right. I set out some possible remedies in my conclusion but one is clear – Labour hasn’t always connected with its natural base, but many of our core values are shared by our natural supporters even if many of them don’t vote for us now.
The motivations of many ordinary people who voted Brexit are not always given a fair hearing, despite the fact that their reasons are logical and coherent, even if you might not agree with them.
Mark, 52, came to see me about a veterans’ project he had organised. He voted for the first time in the referendum. “Democracy is very important”, he said. “Sovereignty is very important. The history of this country is very important.” He feels we are losing more and more power to Brussels and wanted that to stop.
Julie, 43, a mum of three, who is a support worker for autistic people and has worked night shifts for 14 years, made a similar point: “If I was still trade and it was just trade I would have voted to stay all day. But they have too much control over too many things and it’s becoming like a one-party state.”
She added: “I don’t think [Brexit’s] going to be plain sailing. I don’t believe it’s going to be jumping off a cliff. I think people need to step back, forget about nostalgia and what happened in the war and all that. Yes, we survived and we ruled that world at one time, and I do think we are in a position where we have got the chance and the opportunity to grow as a nation and to have our identify recognised again, not so much as a powerful nation but one that should be respected.”
70-year-old Tony, a former engineer and bricklayer, said: “I voted for the common market, just trade, which we could do now. I have no problem with that. But we have turned into this federal state. Gradually and gradually they have been taking money off us, then controlling us, telling us how many fish we can catch.”
Mark had a warning. “If they don’t deliver Brexit, what’s the point in voting? That’s the feeling on the street at the moment.” If Brexit is not delivered, he says, “Democracy is over. Brussels owns it.” He thought it would result in trouble.
Natalie, a 35-year-old hairdresser and salon owner, believes Britain will be fine after Brexit:
“Divorces aren’t kind, they aren’t nice to go through,” she said, “but you have to do it and go through the finances of it, and once you are through the other side everything will be OK. It always is.”
The divide between the people I spoke to and politicians is striking. Mark described the trust in politicians as “almost non-existent,” while Julie said people are “actually feeling insulted by politicians across the board.” This illustrates a wider perception.
Paige, a 24-year-old who lives on disability benefits due to her chronic anxiety, said: “We need people to realise there is a world outside the House of Commons and people need to experience how we live.”
Tony told me: “They are all the same. What’s the point in voting Labour if they are the same as the Conservatives? They are all tarred with the same brush, doing the same thing. You aren’t real Labour at all because you don’t know about working people. You have lost it. It’s called Labour because that was for the working class, now they are for themselves. They come from school to a bigger school, university, then out of this school into politics. What real world experience have they had?”
Army veteran Mark compared political families with military families: “Most I believe are career politicians and it’s handed down to them, family peers and the rest of it. You follow your father and grandfather, like you do in the Army.”
The professionalisation of politics is a huge problem as far as these voters are concerned.
Another strong theme emerged as I continued my one-on-one discussions. All of the people I spoke to felt the odds were stacked against people like them.
Julie said the decision to leave school at 15 with no qualifications is “the biggest regret of my life.” She earns little more than the minimum wage and would like to go to night school to get her GCSE English to prove to herself that she can. She would love to be a full-time author, having self-published four novels on Amazon. She’d love the youngest of her three children to go to university, but cannot financially support him to do so.
Paige also left school at 15 with no qualifications. She was diagnosed with mild autism but felt she didn’t get the support she needed to finish school. She dreams of becoming a midwife but says the education system is too rigid to allow her to learn at her own pace and would mean running up debts she couldn’t afford.
“You could easily just go in and observe and learn it first-hand instead of having to go to college and university. Obviously you are handling life so it’s a big job but what happened to experiencing it first-hand. You learn more first-hand than what you do on paper,” she said.
Barbara also brought up the fact you have to study for a nursing degree nowadays rather than being taken on as a trainee by a hospital as an obstacle to people going into nursing.
Tony believes it is harder now to work your way up from the bottom and there is too much emphasis on going to university. The opportunities presented by the traditional apprenticeship system – where people were properly trained and guaranteed a job afterwards – are denied to the younger generation, he says. He did a five-year apprenticeship in engineering and got a job with the company he trained with, but contrasts this with the experience of his son: “My son tried to do a course to learn plumbing and because he was on a course, they stopped his benefit. They would sooner he was on the dole.”
Barbara, his wife, added: “Our son is just as clever as those uni types but in a practical way. He has a vocation but they disregard people like that. They are just as important. I’m not saying no one should go to university because that’s important but you have to have practical people.” Barbara believes that it was easier to her generation to move up and get on. She worked at a factory before becoming a cleaner at the local council. While there, she attended a local college to learn how to use a computer so she could move into a clerical role, which she stayed in until retirement.
Natalie, a single mum of two who left school at 16, has a happier story. She juggled studying for an Higher National Diploma (HND) as a mature student with working as a hairdresser so she could open her own salon. Though her career is working our well, she did state: “I wish someone had given me some choices and said ‘why don’t you try this, because this is what you are good at,” rather than just letting her drift into hairdressing.
The message is clear. Too many people feel trapped with no way to improve their lives or those of their families.
It may come as a surprise that immigration was barely mentioned by any of my interviewees, although Julie acknowledged it as a factor for some local Brexit voters she knew. She said the nearby Derbyshire town of Shirebrook is now known as “Shirebrookski” because of the high number of Eastern European people who have come over to work in its infamous Sports Direct warehouse and it is now a place that the natives do not consider as a place they would or could work.
Nationally, 41 per cent of 18- 24-year-olds said immigration was too high and 58 per cent of those aged between 25 and 49 said the same, according to Eatwell and Goodwin.
Tony said that he had seen wages for British brickies go down since Eastern European builders have come over and worked for less – even as little as £3 or £5 an hour. He was as concerned for their standard of living as the British natives’ because he said they are living in sub-standard shared accommodation and gang masters line their pockets at their expense. “It is happening all the time and the poor little Poles are getting no money and living in a crappy caravan somewhere,” he said.
The level of support for traditional left-wing politics was striking given that most of the people I spoke to have voted Labour in the past but hadn’t supported the party for years. Mark had never voted before 2016, Tony hadn’t voted for decades, since he last supported the Labour Party, we have lost Barbara to the Conservatives, Julie hadn’t voted Labour for around ten years and Natalie did not vote Labour at the last election, although she has never voted Conservative. That leaves Paige as the only committed Labour voter. Paige is also the only person who I spoke to who has changed her mind about her vote: “I voted Leave…but if I had known further down the line this would be happening I wouldn’t have,” she told me. She describes the referendum campaign as “big words and broken promises” and wants “a chance to put it right.”
Mark wants more spending for the NHS and education. Julie said: “My Dad is in a care home and the pension and everything he has worked for all his life has gone towards his care and it’s still not enough to cover the cost.”
Social care spending is a priority for her and so, too, is investment in our Armed Forces, with her middle child having just joined the Army. She would also like to see university fees reduced.
Barbara and Tony live in a former council house bought under the Right to Buy scheme. “We thought the idea was we would buy this, then the council would have the money and build new council houses, which would be brilliant. They stole that money that we gave to them. Somebody stole that money and they haven’t built one house with it.” Their granddaughter and her partner are paying higher rents for a privately rented property and have little chance of being able to save up a deposit to buy their own home.
Theresa May’s efforts at getting more support for her deal by offering cash to constituencies like mine has won little traction here. People are not fooled and ask why, if she has money to give away, it isn’t already being spent in areas that need it most. As Julie put it: “How stupid does she think we are? I thought bribery was a crime.”
There is also anger from many about the fact big businesses do not pay their fair share of taxes.
This is all fertile ground for Labour. But we need to connect and we need more working-class voices in parliament to do make inroads.
In 1979, 98 of the 619 MPs in parliament had worked in manual jobs. In the space of three decades, the number has plummeted to just 19 – a mere three per cent of parliamentarians. Ex-miners like Dennis Skinner, once two a penny on the Labour benches, are now lonely voices in a chamber dominated by professionals and the university educated. 77 per cent of Labour MPs went to university and just seven per cent used to do manual jobs.
It would be too easy to conclude parliament is simply reflecting wider economic shifts. While the pits may have closed, Britain’s working class hasn’t disappeared. Instead, a new army of care workers, cleaners, Amazon pickers and supermarket packers has emerged, but where are the MPs who used to do those jobs?
Most of the people I spoke to thought politicians are all the same, but they don’t mean politically – after all Labour and the Tories are further apart ideologically than they have been for decades. They mean that we are all from the same group; a group they think knows nothing about their lives.
Another clear lesson is that lifelong education and training must be at the heart of our education policy. Too many people from ordinary backgrounds get a once in a lifetime chance to move onwards and upwards aged 15 or 16. If things don’t work out at that age they must get a second or third chance. One way of doing this is through apprenticeships, which give people the chance to earn as they train, but just over half (51 per cent) of apprenticeship starts in 2017/18 in Ashfield were at Level Three or above, compared to 55 per cent in the East Midlands and 57 per cent in England.
The stats show that the number of apprenticeships has plummeted during Barbara and Tony’s working lives. Apprentice numbers increased in the late 1940s and 1950s in line with the boom in manufacturing industry, and the proportion of male school leavers aged 15-17 entering apprenticeships reached approximately 35 per cent by the mid-1960s. In 1966, there were almost 250,000 apprentices. This number had fallen to 53,000 by 1990. It is on the increase now, but are these apprenticeships leading to the secure, skilled employment they once did?
We cannot fail Paige or Julie, or Barbara and Tony’s children. Going back to college as a mature student and achieving her HND in Hair and Beauty Management changed Natalie’s life, but she said that while she didn’t mind taking out what she felt were reasonable student loans for living costs and tuition fees, she would not have done this with the current level of fees and cannot imagine her children doing so.
Ashfield is the fourth worst place in the country for sending kids to university. In 2018, just 16.5 per cent of 18-year-olds started a full-time degree course, down by four per cent from the year before. The average for English constituencies is just under 34 per cent. Ashfield is falling further behind other areas and its strong Leave vote fits in perfectly with the statistics.
The truth is that none of these problems were created by membership of the EU and nor will they be solved by leaving. There is good news. Those I spoke to who didn’t vote Labour at the last election or indeed for many years all would have been attracted to what was in Labours last manifesto. They all wanted more public spending and asked where the money should go health, education, social care, council house building and support for the military came up.
After Brexit, we need to bring the country back together and the left back together too. I find it hard to comprehend that I’m now at odds with Tony Blair and Gordon Brown on whether to respect the referendum result, but I will remain ever grateful to these Labour giants for changing Britain and removing my mum and dad from the poverty my family had known for so long.
Some of my closest parliamentary colleagues and allies who once embraced me with a hug now look at me with a grimace. Left-wing friends I had made in London over the years now send me angry emails and attack me on social media for arguing that we should respect the referendum result. One such email just dropped into my inbox while writing this, from a woman I worked with in TV in my 20s.
“The question is how can you morally vote for something that you now know for certain, because of what has happened in the Brexit negotiations, is going to make your constituents’ lives worse off. Isn’t it your job as their representative to tell your constituents the truth?”
We are all entitled to different views but a split on the left will kill us and the sooner we realise that the better. We will never get a Labour government without assembling a coalition of the working class and the liberal middle class.
In the 1980s and 90s the emphasis was on winning over more affluent southern voters who weren’t voting Labour. The problem that was identified was that traditional Labour voters were a shrinking pool. Southern Discomfort – the famous Fabian pamphlets written by Labour MP Giles Radice to emphasise the point that without the support of C1, skilled working class, and C2, lower middle class, voters in the south of England, Labour would never form a government – argued that “while Labour’s traditional support in the manufacturing industry, trade unions, among manual workers and on council estates was being eroded, the Conservative “core” amongst white collar workers, those not in unions, and homeowners, was expanding.”
In the late 80s and 90s, heartland seats and Labour members were asked to make concessions to those voters. The argument was that winning seats down south was the only way we could get into government to transform the lives of our heartland voters. That process may have been painful for some traditional Labour voters and members but it was absolutely necessary to get a Labour government. It was the right strategy then. It is not the right strategy now because the working class did not die, it just changed. We need to reconnect with our traditional voters, particularly those in Leave constituencies in the North and Midlands, many of whom started to abandon us in the last couple of decades.
With that in mind, Southern Discomfort is no longer the challenge. It is time for Labour to rediscover its Northern Soul.
What frustrates me about this is that most of the examples she gives are nothing to do with the EU and a consequence of UK government policy, but even so she believes we should implement their wishes – despite the basis of them being wonky and a very significant number of people who don’t want the change.
Blimey, that must have taken you ages to type out.
That was a very long way of saying: “If the Labour party hadn’t spent the last 30 years parachuting public school educated southern tossers into safe northern seats this would never happened.”
But they did, and it has.
A great article but I too think the ‘age’ reference is over egged. My parents were 86 and 84 at the time of the referendum. My daughter was 16 and unable to vote. However she had a keen interest in the referendum and its result. She asked her Grand Parents how they were going to vote they said that they would probably vote leave. Her response was ‘why are you doing that for, you are running my future’.
After the day of the referendum they called her to say they had listened to her and changed their minds and voted to stay. So the oldies who voted to leave really needed stroppy Grandkids to put them straight.
I have friends who voted for their kids. Mine agreed with me anyway and I voted remain.
I voted the way I did because I reckon 71 years (as at 2016) without a World War (a.k.a. “European War”) was a pretty good deal.
Pretty sobering to read Will Self, in one of today’s newspaper supplements, fearing that he might see a European war in his lifetime. I fear he might be right.
That’s what you’ve left this country Cameron.
You fat, 60s-dodging, 1980s loving, piece of puss.
You forgot pig bothering.
European war? You seem to have forgotten the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Arguably, current events in Ukraine are also a European war.
I think it was Bill Bryson who made the observation about Britain’s great academics, entrepreneurs and inventors. An awful lot of them were CofE vicars. These gentlemen were paid well, provided with a house and, in many cases, had staff to look after them. All they had to do was blather out a weekly sermon and the odd wedding, perhaps.
I’m not suggesting a return to those days, but if the workforce is made to work all hours and travel several hours a day to get to and from there, you’re not going to many Tharg Stations invented.
‘There are now serious concerns among Tory moderates that the party’s handling of Brexit will hit its reputation.’ The Grauniad 9/2/19.
Well, we can’t have that, can we?
I don’t see why the thoughts of a London food and TV critic should carry particular weight. I greatly admired much of Gill’s writing while simultaneously thinking him a bit of a tosser.
But apparently anyone from AA Gill to Goldman Sachs is now on the side of the angels because of their anti-Brexit stance. With the former, I would suggest – to be a Brexiteer in his milieu would be nigh-on impossible. For a well-known contrarian such as he to be against Brexit could either indicate that the whole idea was bonkers or that he possibly saw which side his bread was buttered. Who can say?
As far as Goldman Sachs and all other major financial institutions are concerned – they will always prefer the status quo as they have the economies of scale to work around what would be onerous red tape for any would be entrants.
Wasn’t the main point of the post that it was written before the referendum and yet much of what he said has proven to be correct?
Careful now, that’s a rational analysis of the OP, don’t let’s get intelligent, put on the Pet Shop Boys again instead.
In comparing it to a messy divorce he was certainly prophetic. But I think the article overall is a bit sneering. I think grandstanding and throwing insults is unhelpful at a time when understanding and compromise are the things we need to fix things.
His writing about Europe, especially the penultimate paragraph, expresses so well how I feel. I once went to California with the idea that I wanted to live there. I thought the common language would make it easy, but it just made me realise how European I was, how much more confident and comfortable I felt in non-English speaking European countries, purely because of a shared history and culture.
At the time of the referendum, when Gill wrote his article, I was very much against any form of insult. I found the sneers and insults flying from both sides an ugly distraction from the debate. And I knew a few Leave voters who were far from being small-minded, or xenophobic, or racist, or thick. But even with his negative comments I think Gill expresses himself with great eloquence. And now, after two years of information and chaos, the only two people I personally know who are still fervently pro-Brexit, as currently touted, are indeed small-minded, racist and thick: so I’m a little less perturbed by the insults.
I am back in love with you young man – impeccably well put together (in every sense)
Thank you, Lodey. Words cannot express my delight. So I am working on a coreography that will involve both dance and mime.
Throw off your mental chains.
Those Norwegians and Swiss – frightful racists, eh?
‘Ever closer union’ was always a hubristic idea.
There isn’t a neat parallel between Brexit and Trump but I feel there is in this sense – that the bewildered losing side, far from trying to engage with the vast numbers who disagree with them, have instead doubled down on the ‘deplorables’ strategy that served them so *cough* well before.
As I said, I think sneers and insults (and sarcasm too, Dougie) are unwelcome elements in any debate.
Opposing membership of the EU is a perfectly reasonable and debatable position. Supporting a withdrawal from the EU that you know hasn’t been adequately planned or prepared for, isn’t.
Alanis Morrisette is no doubt reaching for her pen, given that AA Gill’s very own messy divorce was from Amber Rudd.
Our Brexit shop turned up today. 2 years of accumulated Nectar points blown on store cupboard staples. As I was stacking it all up in the utility room I still can’t believe we’re doing this – I’m the type who usually laughs at people who spend hundreds of pounds on food at Xmas because the shops will be shut for a couple of days. Still hoping it’s an overreaction which we’ll laugh about in a few months, but I’m worried enough to think it’s necessary.
My Brexit-supporting parents (I was genuinely surprised by their decision) continue to argue it would all be OK “if we’d negotiated it properly”. Neither are Tories, who did they think would be in charge of handling it? So angry.
I thought you meant staples…the little metal bendy wire things you propel with a stapler, and that there are “store cupboard” staples.
Y2K
I would love to see the results of a survey with the following two questions:
1 Did you vote Remain or Leave?
2 Would you vote the same way now?
I imagine the results would be fascinating and instructive. I’d like to think that people are at least more informed on the subject than they were in 2016.
1) Remain.
2) Yes.
What he said.
As an expat living in the EU I didn’t get a vote. In a way that could be considered fair – not living in the UK I’ll be far less affected by the outcome. But the fact is that losing our rights as EU citizens will affect ex-pats in some extremely important ways and I strongly believe we should have had a say. (I would have voted Remain and still would, )
My point was I would think there are many “Leaves” who might reconsider their position; not so many the other way round.
That’s certainly what I’ve found among people I know (I don’t know many people though).
Read this at the weekend (in a sci fi novel about bio engineering, of all things).
“Change hurts, but it hurts most those who shackle themselves to the past.”
Seemed apposite to Gill’s commentary about those who ‘want their country back.’
Great piece. Thanks for posting.
We’ll never get Adrian Gill back, but maybe, one day, we’ll get our European family back.
I noticed that this thread from 2019 was the second most viewed this month of March 2024 but nobody commented. I’m curious. Who’s looking at it, and then tiptoeing away without registering their presence? Nostalgic A A Gill fans? Leavers interested to know why they were wrong all along? It’s a mystery, but it was great to read that blistering piece again.
No comeback though.
All the people who were told – very aggressively – that their correct predictions were ‘Project Fear’.
Any apologies?
Very few.
Farmers/fishermen et al told by their own industry leaders… ‘erm… not a good idea’… any emotion apart from self-pity? Maybe, but I haven’t heard much else.
I still see many (most, where I live) 70+ year olds waddling up every day to get their Mails and Expresses, I doubt they’ve changed their tune. Many don’t know what day it is and, if they do, I don’t think they care anyway.
And Fat Boy Cameron is back in the fray, don’t bet against that twat being Tory leader again. All he or Fat Boy J have to do to get back to their old position is express a desire to want to do it. That’s all it will take. The biggest threat either would encounter would be from each other.
I read today (in Empireland), that both the Mail and the Express were launched towards the end of Victoria’s reign at a time of ‘New Imperialism’ as deliberate trumpeters of the virtues of colonialism. I think such bigoted ignorance has steered both publications from then until now – my country, extreme right and wrong.
Now who could have said this?
There are any number of male UK politicians whose thoughts might well turn to what “makes trade harder”