Centenary Essay: "Labour's First Fight Was For Freedom."

The Battle Cry Of Freedom: Three years after its founding conference, in the general election of 1919, voters were invited to join “Labour’s Liberty Campaign”. Guided by the ghost of Richard John Seddon, the sturdy young Labour Party is depicted rolling up its sleeves to do battle with Massey and his cohorts on behalf of the “Democratic Public”. Labour’s first fight was a fight for freedom.

 

IN EARLY JULY, 1916, leftists and liberals of every stripe gathered in Wellington to form a new political party.

 

New Zealand was at war. In the 23 months since August 1914, thousands of the Dominion’s young men had been killed, and thousands more wounded and maimed. The government of William (Bill) Massey appealed for more recruits.

 

The Prime Minister’s appeal was powerfully seconded by the Dominion’s leading newspaper proprietors, who urged the youth that remained to do their duty by King and Country. Many responded, but nowhere near enough to refill the depleted ranks of the NZ Expeditionary Force.

 

In 1915, legislation requiring all single men to register for possible military service alerted the war’s opponents to the near-certainty that Massey’s coalition government was preparing to introduce conscription.

 

In January of 1916, socialists and trade unionists met in Wellington to debate the ethics of conscripting men – but not wealth. At the conclusion of their conference a Manifesto Against Conscription was issued. Arguing that true equality of sacrifice was impossible to guarantee, the Manifesto insisted that war service remain voluntary:

 

“Thousands of our comrades strenuously opposed to compulsion in any form have gone as volunteers, and while their backs are turned we must use every effort to preserve intact the civil rights our people have won. There must be no surrender of principles which have raised British citizenship above serfdom.”

 

It wasn’t enough. As predicted, Massey opted for conscription. His Military Service Bill would become law on 1 August 1916. Equally predictably, in the first week of July, those responsible for the Manifesto Against Conscription: Peter Fraser, Bob Semple and Harry Holland; along with just about every other left-wing leader in New Zealand; began arriving in Wellington. Words had not been enough: now it was time for deeds.

 

The creation of the New Zealand Labour Party was largely the work of trade unionists. Yes – but not exclusively so. What’s more, those early labour leaders were a far cry from the dour union bosses remembered by Kiwis who came of age in the 1950s and 60s.

 

Seventeen months before the New Zealand Left began gathering in Wellington, the American union song-writer, Ralph Chaplin, had penned the words to that greatest of union anthems, Solidarity Forever. Here’s the final verse:

 

In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,

Greater than the might of armies magnified a thousand fold.

We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old,

For the union makes us strong.

 

It was precisely this “new world” of socialism and freedom that Massey and his mounted constabulary (Massey’s Cossacks!) had fought so hard to forestall just two years before Chaplin wrote his song. In the “Great Strike” of 1913, the “Red” Federation of Labour had been crushed. It is easy to imagine Massey’s fury, three years later, as he watched those indomitable “Red Feds”, Fraser, Semple and Holland, abandon the path of industrial militancy for the parliamentary road.

 

One hundred years on, the reader may wince at a phrase like “socialism and freedom”. It is, however, used advisedly. The men and women who formed the New Zealand Labour Party in July 1916 were driven by the conviction that, without economic justice and social equality, political freedom was forever being stillborn. We would be much mistaken, however, were we to believe that they considered freedom to be, somehow, less important than justice and equality.

 

Remember the words of the Manifesto Against Conscription: “we must use every effort to preserve intact the civil rights our people have won”. Labour’s founders knew that without political freedom, neither economic justice nor social equality could ever be attained.

 

Three years after its founding conference, in the general election of 1919, voters were invited to join “Labour’s Liberty Campaign”. Guided by the ghost of Richard John Seddon, the sturdy young Labour Party is depicted rolling up its sleeves to do battle with Massey and his cohorts on behalf of the “Democratic Public”. Labour’s first fight was a fight for freedom. Entirely fitting for a party whose leaders had been jailed for sedition and court-martialled for standing against conscription.

 

One hundred years later, the attainment of economic justice and social equality still depends on exercising fearlessly “the civil rights our people have won.”

 

Labour and Freedom must march together.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 8 July 2016.

Equally Disappointing: What Should We Take From The Australian Election?

Sitting Pretty: Even if Australia's incumbent Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Bill Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.

 

BILL SHORTEN’S FOREWARNINGS may yet ensure a rich electoral harvest for the Australian Labor Party. His prediction that Medicare, Australia’s public health system, would be at risk if Malcolm Turnbull and his Liberal-National Coalition were returned to office certainly focused the minds of Australia’s poor. Fear of losing Gough Whitlam’s greatest legacy to the Australian people, combined with Compulsory Voting (which ensures that poor Australians actually vote) may yet be enough to make Shorten Australia’s next prime minister.
 

Even if Turnbull somehow manages to scrape together a ramshackle government, Shorten has almost certainly done enough to keep his ALP colleagues’ daggers in their sheaths. Labor’s voters are especially delighted that Turnbull’s discomfiture is the result of Shorten turning the Liberals’ own weapons against them.
 

Election after election, the Liberals and their right-wing media allies have employed scare tactics against Labor. This time, however, it was Labor doing the scarifying. What’s more, those scare tactics contained a sizeable kernel of truth. The Liberals would relish the privatisation of Medicare. Why? Because it’s an article of ideological faith among Australia’s “economic rationalists” that the private sector is better at supplying services than the state. To claim, as Turnbull did – repeatedly and with growing exasperation – that his party harboured no such intentions raised disingenuousness to new heights.
 

Shorten’s tactics recall those employed by Helen Clark in the New Zealand general election of 2005. On that occasion the warning issued was about housing and the likely consequences for state house tenants of a Don Brash/National Party win. It was enough to see the large South Auckland polling booths tip the balance in Labour’s favour.
 

Twelve years on, and Labour’s 2005 warnings concerning housing and the fate of state house tenants are being vindicated almost daily. That it has taken so long is because National’s ideological antagonism towards state housing, which Don Brash displayed openly and honestly, has been camouflaged and concealed by John Key’s government.
 

It has been National’s intention, ever since winning power in 2008, to eliminate the state as New Zealand’s default housing provider. According to the economist, and author of “Generation Rent”, Shamubeel Eaqub, New Zealand’s stock of state houses – proportional to its population – is at levels not seen since 1949. At the core of National’s housing policy is the all-too-familiar neoliberal negation of the state’s capacity to respond to social need. In terms of practical policy, this is expressed by facilitating the entrenchment of the private sector as the only legitimate provider of housing – even for the poor.
 

The radicalism of this new policy regime is only slowly being recognised. Much easier to spot has been the sudden emergence into public view of the consequences of the state abdicating its role as housing provider of last resort. The grim spectacle of families living in their cars has stimulated public outrage and forced the National Government’s hand.
 

At the National Party’s 80th annual conference, held in Christchurch over the weekend, the Prime Minister announced the establishment of a billion-dollar Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF) to kick start what is intended to be a local government-administered housing construction programme. This latter effort seems likely to become the responsibility of a new legal entity – the Urban Development Authority (UDA). The first cities to receive a UDA will be those currently experiencing the fastest population growth: Auckland, Hamilton, Tauranga, Christchurch and Queenstown. The HIF will not, however, be empowered to issue genuine grants to these cities, only loans, and the funds expended are to facilitate the plans of private property developers exclusively.
 

Dismissed by Labour Leader, Andrew Little, as “a rushed, piecemeal policy that hasn’t been thought through”, Key will, nevertheless, be hoping that voters receive these announcements as evidence that his Government is, at last, “doing something”. It is nowhere near enough, but unless Labour executes a radical overhaul of its own, very similar, housing policies, Key’s latest efforts will be compared not unfavourably with his opponents’.
 

The extraordinarily close finish in the Australian general election is, in part, a reflection of the extremely drab selection of colours in which both the Left and the Right were content to paint their country’s future. What most Australians experienced was an overlong campaign characterised by limitation, negation and fear. Without the enforced participation of Compulsory Voting, Turnbull’s Liberal-National Coalition would have been returned handily. The self-interest of the “Haves” would have seen to that.
 

To ensure the participation of the “Have Nots” in 2017, New Zealand Labour will have to offer much more than Shorten-style scare-tactics. To compensate for the lack of compulsory voting, Little needs to devise a campaign that is expansive, affirmative and chock-full of hope.
 

If a broad programme of state house construction does not lie at the heart of that campaign, then a hung parliament will be the most that Labour deserves.
 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 5 July 2016.

Alone And Friendless: The Curious Fate Of The New Zealand Middle Class.

Doing All Right? Separated from its former working class allies; dictated to by an international ruling class it cannot control; the New Zealand middle class is, today, almost entirely absorbed with its own survival. House prices, retirement plans, and the fecklessness of the lower orders are the obsessions du jour. The besetting conundrum: how to ensure their children enjoy a middle class existence, without relinquishing their own in the process?

 

WHAT HAS HAPPENED to the New Zealand Middle Class? Why has the social strata that encompasses our best educated, most highly skilled, most entrepreneurial and financially literate citizens, failed so miserably to respond to our nation’s needs? When did the Middle Class relinquish the moral and civic leadership upon which its claims to social pre-eminence rested? How, and by whom, has the Middle Class been superseded?

 

Like so many of the answers to the questions about what has gone wrong with New Zealand, the answer to these particular questions must be looked for in the social and economic changes of the 1980s.

 

Up until 1981, New Zealand society remained the co-creation of its working and middle classes. Beginning with the Liberal Government of the 1890s, this extraordinary collaborative effort assumed its mature form in the First Labour Government of 1935-1949.

 

Paradoxically, it was the extraordinary success of the governments of Michael Joseph Savage and Peter Fraser that shifted the balance of social power within New Zealand society from the working to the middle class. Labour’s reforms had led to a significant increase in the political weight of middle class votes. A bitter Labour Party joke from the 1949 election expressed this crucial electoral shift: “They walked to the polls to vote us in, and drove to the polls to vote us out.”

 

The key beneficiary of this shift was the National Party, which went on to dominate the electoral politics of the post-war era. Before it could assume the mantle of New Zealand’s “natural party of government”, however, National was required to pledge its allegiance to the welfare state Labour had created. Memories of the Great Depression were still clear enough in 1949 for middle class voters to understand that it was the social-democratic reforms of the 30s and 40s which had reconstituted their social status and laid the foundation for their prosperity.

 

The result was a nation in which the middle and working classes advanced together, albeit with the former expanding at a slightly faster rate than the latter.

 

It was the 1981 Springbok Tour that shattered the unity of New Zealand’s working and middle classes. The middle-class members of the Baby Boom Generation, in particular, felt psychically alienated from working-class New Zealanders. Thanks to the Tour, the latter found themselves despised as an irredeemable collection of racist, sexist and homophobic thugs – who voted for National’s Rob Muldoon.

 

The prime beneficiary of this psychic break was the Labour Party – a political organisation increasingly dominated by the young, upwardly-mobile, professional inheritors of New Zealand’s fifty-year social-democratic legacy. With no experience of the conditions which had drawn middle and working class New Zealanders together in the 1930s, these were the Labour politicians whose “free market” policies of the 1980s would, in a frighteningly short period of time, tear them apart.

 

Having watched in disbelief as Labour deliberately cut itself adrift from its working class base, the National Party, in 1990, was quick to take full advantage of the widening socio-economic schisms “Rogernomics” had created. National’s near-destruction of organised labour in the private sector embedded a new layer of middle class managers in the nation’s workplaces. Similarly, the Bolger Government’s mass sell-off of state houses set in motion the apparently irreversible trend towards middle class landlordism. Far from being collaborators in the joint advancement of their respective classes, middle and working class New Zealanders had become economic, social and political antagonists. That the working class was now an increasingly Maori and Pasifika phenomenon, did little to slow the rate at which the gulf between the two classes was widening.

 

Another widening gulf was that which separated New Zealand’s middle class from the new, essentially supra-national, ruling class, in whose hands the country’s future now rested. Globalisation, and the neoliberal regime which enforced it, didn’t just break the power of the organised working class, it also unseated New Zealand’s complaisant ruling class. The economic, cultural and political elites who had accepted the terms of the post-war social-democratic settlement were replaced by those who understood, and were fiercely loyal to, the policies of the new order.

 

Separated from its former working class allies; dictated to by an international ruling class it cannot control; the New Zealand middle class is, today, almost entirely absorbed with its own survival. House prices, retirement plans, and the fecklessness of the lower orders are the obsessions du jour. The besetting conundrum: how to ensure their children enjoy a middle class existence, without relinquishing their own in the process?

 

The generous and collaborative middle class, which won New Zealand international acclaim for its progressive economic, social and political reforms, has largely ceased to exist. Without allies, and without hope, its selfish successor squabbles fractiously on a dwindling sand hill, fatally encumbered by the shabby detritus of its own illusory superiority.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 21 June 2016.

From Top To Bottom: Some Thought’s On Britain’s Brexit Nightmare.

How Did That Happen! The vote to leave the EU poses a direct threat to the futures of Neoliberalism’s expensively credentialed children. Like no other use of the ballot box in their lifetimes, it has frightened the Tops. It’s as if the yobs and the chavs have turned the world upside down, which, in a way, they have.

 

THE MAGNITUDE OF THE CRISIS now overtaking Britain is difficult to exaggerate. A society obsessed with class has somehow to deal with the impossible fact that those on the bottom have over-ruled those at the top. Yes, that has happened before in the history of the British Isles: in 1381, 1642, 1832 and 1945. But on all those occasions the Bottom was inspired and supported by a small but crucial faction of progressive Tops. Brexit is different. Brexit has turned the progressive historical tradition on its head. This time the Bottom has thrown in its lot with a rogue faction of reactionary Tops.

 

No one in New Zealand has summed up the situation more succinctly than ex-pat Brit, Josie Pagani. “Nearly every one of the working-class kids I went to school with voted to leave,” she lamented, “while everyone I went to university with voted to remain.” The bare statistics back up Josie’s observation. On the day of the Referendum, the Guardian website affirmed that the factor most closely related to whether a person had voted to Leave or Remain was their level of education.

 

Josie’s heartfelt cry recalled one of my most intense experiences of the 1981 Springbok Tour .

 

A protest crowd had gathered outside the Springbok’s Dunedin hotel. People were angry that the deal Hart had negotiated with the Police, under whose terms protesters were to be allowed within sight of Carisbrook, had been broken. In light rain, they sat down on the street and awaited developments.

 

Pretty soon the “Blue” riot squad emerged from the hotel car-park and jogged into position. Across the street a somewhat smaller crowd of Tour supporters had assembled to watch the fun. “Rug-bee!” they chanted, “Rug-bee!”

 

The Blue Squad commander ordered the protesters to disperse. Nobody moved. He ordered his men to advance, halting them at the very edge of the sit-down demonstration. From somewhere in the crowd, someone started singing the national anthem.

 

The officer in command looked at the crowd. He saw university professors, lawyers and school teachers; frail old ladies and young middle-class students. The lone singer had been joined by others: God of nations, at thy feet, in the bonds of love we meet, hear our voices, we entreat, God defend our free land. The Police commander sighed. Slowly, rank-by-rank, he withdrew his men.

 

The pro-tour crowd fell silent. What was happening? The truck-drivers and shop assistants, freezing workers and bar staff didn’t yet comprehend the slowly emerging truth. The new reality which, by the end of the 1980s, would become frighteningly clear. Their credentials for citizenship weren’t good enough. They no longer counted.

 

The Springbok Tour supporters’ 1981 vote of appreciation to Rob Muldoon’s National Government was the New Zealand Bottom’s last hurrah. Three years later, Rogernomics was unleashed upon New Zealand. To be recognised in the new New Zealand, citizens had to be appropriately credentialed. Educational qualifications, and the political correctness absorbed while acquiring them, were the new model citizen’s indispensable passports to the neoliberal age of globalisation. Those without either were fit only for exploitation and impoverishment. The “dignity of labour” joined words like “solidarity” and “equality” in the dustbin at the end of history.

 

The punishment awaiting Britain’s uncredentialed will be no less savage than that meted out to the “Rug-bee!” chanters of New Zealand. Indeed, it is likely to be even more brutal. The vote to leave the EU poses a direct threat to the futures of Neoliberalism’s expensively credentialed children. Like no other use of the ballot box in their lifetimes, it has frightened the Tops. It’s as if the yobs and the chavs have turned the world upside down, which, in a way, they have.

 

The retribution of the Tops will be swift and unforgiving.

 

Already there is speculation that the ouster of Corbyn is just the opening gambit in a sequence of political moves designed to overturn the referendum result. Labour’s new leader will mobilise the professional middle-class around the party’s demand for an early election. Having secured it, Labour’s will frame the forthcoming vote as a second referendum on Europe. Those who want to stay out of the EU will be invited to vote for Boris Johnson’s Tories. Those wishing to stay in will have only one viable option. The yobs and the chavs will be bought off with a handful of policy sweeteners. A neo-Blairite Labour Party will secure the Tops’ “Remain” mandate, and Britain will be awakened from her Brexit fever dream by the EU’s forgiving kiss.

 

And then the nightmare of the British working-class will begin in earnest.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 30 June 2016.

Our Man In London.

"I'm calling about Corbyn. Need any help?"

 

PICTURE HIM. He’s in his late 40s, tall, greying hair elegantly styled. His suit is Italian bespoke, from the immigrant tailor with the studio just around the corner from his favourite pub. His basic salary is safely into six figures (Sterling) and his bonus this year was spectacular. What does he do? Basically, he answers questions about the future. Where is the market going? Where will oil be in six months’ time? What’s happening to gold? Who’s putting what where? Which commodities are trending up? What’s going down? It’s not his money, of course, but even so, he’s got to be right at least as often as he’s wrong. Fortunately, he wears the pressure every bit as stylishly as he wears his Italian suit.

 

Not that he’s one of those Old Etonian, Oxbridge toffs like David Cameron or Boris Johnson. No, no. He received his secondary education at the local grammar school and graduated from a respectable red-brick university. Displaying a rare aptitude for student politics, he was swiftly taken up by the leading lights of the University Labour Club. A vacation job in the office of his local Labour MP led him into even higher-powered political circles. Upon graduation a job was waiting for him at Westminster. His boss was only a junior minister outside Cabinet – but widely regarded as a rising star. Our boy rose with him.

 

He met his wife in the lobby of the House of Commons. She was working for a Tory shadow minister of roughly equal rank to his own. Their backgrounds were remarkably similar – apart from the fact that, in her case, it was the University Conservative Club that had spotted her political talents. “Just think,” she teased, “if Labour had been quicker off the mark we might have been colleagues!” They were married on the country estate of her boss. “Marquees everywhere and Krug by the case! Not bad for a grammar school boy!”

 

The installation of the Conservative Lib-Dem coalition government in 2010 saw him snapped-up by a major financial institution in the City. His networks were impressive and his understanding of the UK economy even more so. What his new employers most admired about him was the ease with which he carried his many and varied talents. On neither shoulder were there any discernible chips. Gregarious, good-natured, and the proud possessor of one of the finest hip-hop collections in London, even the toffs liked him.

 

If he really was as good as everyone (including himself) thought he was, however, he should have spotted the enormous risk Cameron was taking when, in 2013, he promised an In/Out binding referendum on EU membership. His wife’s parents had friends who were members of UKIP, and they were worried. “David doesn’t really have a very good grasp of the provincial middle-class mind”, they vouchsafed to their son-in-law. “We don’t think he understands the degree to which he’s putting his future into the hands of the English working-class.”

 

He saw the irony, of course, but 2013 was back in the BC – Before Corbyn – era. “Labour is rock-solid for the EU,” he reassured his wife. “Cameron’s as safe as houses.”

 

Corbyn was the game-changer. None of our man’s friends in the party saw the old bugger coming. With his beard and his bicycle – and his penchant for defying the Whip – Corbyn was regarded as a rather poor 1980s joke. Like the Scottish National Party, he was not to be taken seriously.

 

Until he won.

 

Our man simply could not fathom how Corbyn, like the SNP, had been able to shake Labour to its very foundations. Neither of them grasped the impossibility of their dreams. The old fool and his followers didn’t seem to understand that the world had moved beyond the restorative policies of an ageing Trotskyist from Islington. Like Scotland, he just didn’t have the right sort of resources, or the right sort of friends.

 

Then along came Cameron’s bloody referendum. Suddenly, it was no longer enough to have the right sort of resources and the right sort of friends. Unaccountably, they no longer seemed to work.

 

His wife’s people reported that the shires were in open revolt. The dragon’s teeth that, year after year, UKIP had sown among the fields and hedgerows of “Little England” had grown into a veritable Game of Thrones collection of unstoppable fire-breathers. And who was that, sitting astride one of their scaly necks, looking for all the world like Daenerys, Mother of Dragons? Bloody Boris Johnson – that’s who!

 

Which meant that it was now up to Labour to save the day. Meaning it was up to Corbyn to save the day. Apparently, he knew how to talk to working people. He’d persuade them to get out and vote for “Remain”.

 

Our man’s wife was sceptical. “Corbyn’s a Londoner, darling, and I’m not sure a Londoner is the right sort of person to persuade your party’s ‘Friends in the North’. Indeed, I’m not sure that Labour any longer has anyone who can speak to the working-class of this country about the things that matter to them.”

 

Our man wasn’t convinced. Weren’t the polls shifting back towards ‘Remain’? Hadn’t the tragic assassination of Jo Cox reminded the working-class who their real friends were? When his bosses asked him which way the electorate was going to jump, he gave them his most winning smile, and told them not to worry. At the end of the day, the people would know what was good for them.

 

That advice cost his employers a great deal of money. There’d be no bonus this year to pay for the boys school fees. Never mind, there was always politics. Labour was in dire need of some sound advice. He reached for his cell-phone and scrolled through his contacts until he found the number.

 

The accent at the other end was pure Oxbridge: “Good Lord, old chap, how long has it been? To what do I owe the pleasure?”

 

“I’m calling about Corbyn. Need any help?”

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 28 June 2016.

Hooked On A Feeling: There Was Nothing Rational About Brexit.

Britain's Bellwether: The big vote for "Leave" in Sunderland was the first sign that Britain was on the way out of the European Union. But why did Sunderland, a strongly regenerating industrial city, not grasp the rational arguments for EU membership? Because rationality had nothing to do with how people voted. As always in politics, it was about power and control. Who had it - and who didn't.

 

SUNDERLAND was Britain’s bellwether. When the news came through on (our) Friday morning that 61 percent of its citizens had voted to leave the European Union (EU) the Pound went into freefall. Suddenly, the political class’s smug confidence that Britain would remain in the EU was exposed as wishful thinking. If the prosperous, go-ahead city of Sunderland had decided not to stay, then, clearly, Britain was leaving.
 

Sunderland prosperous and go-ahead? Well, yes, apparently. Once famed for its shipbuilding, coal-mining and glass manufacturing, this classic north-east English industrial city (roughly the size of Christchurch) has certainly experienced some very hard times over the past forty years. Today, however, it ranks as one of Britain’s more successful “regenerating” communities. The automobile manufacturer, Nissan, set up shop in 1986, and Sunderland now boasts Britain’s largest car factory. More recently, the city’s burgeoning service sector lifted Sunderland into Britain’s top seven “intelligent” cities.
 

From this distance, the temptation is to imagine a stereotypical group of cloth-capped, blue-collared, left-behind “Mackem”, sitting in the pub and jeering whenever a “Remain” campaigner appeared the TV to warn them of the serious economic consequences should Britain vote to leave.
 

“Eee, by heck, lad, yer cam oop ‘ere and tell us abart ‘serious economic consequences’, and we’ll sha yer tee rotting docks and tee closed pits and send yer back tee London and all yer canny mates wi’ tee message that lee-if oop ‘ere could ‘ardly git any worse!”
 

In Maggie Thatcher’s Britain of the1980s, maybe. But not in the “Sunlun” of 2016.
 

On the basis of Sunderland’s recent economic performance, the response of its overwhelmingly working-class population to the EU Referendum was expected to reflect a cautious optimism. It is, after all, a city in which upwards of 60 percent of citizens own their own homes, and where large numbers of young people are taking full advantage of its expanding tertiary education sector. Sunderland is also an overwhelmingly white city, with fewer than 10 percent non-white residents.
 

Why then did it vote so decisively to leave the EU?
 

Exactly the same question is being asked by members of the political class from all over Britain – and the world. Wasn’t “Remain” the only rational choice? Even with all its flaws, weren’t the British people indisputably better off within the EU than without it? Obviously, voting to “Leave” was politically irrational. It made no sense. Why would anyone do it?
 

But leaving the EU was never about behaving rationally. Those asking their fellow Britons to vote for “Leave” were speaking directly to their hearts – not their heads. Overwhelmingly, the people who voted “Leave” in the referendum were guided by how they felt about themselves; their community; and their nation. And these feelings, like just about everything else in politics, were driven by issues of power and control.
 

Do you feel in control of your life? Do you feel in control of your community? Do you feel in control of your country? Do you feel in control of your future? Who has power over you? Who do you exercise power over?
 

To those whose employment is both precarious and/or oppressive, the sense of being in control of one’s life is weak. The sense of being at the mercy of others, on the other hand, is very strong.
 

The presence of EU immigrants in British communities, with all the attendant pressures on local housing, health, education and employment, not only fuelled anger and prejudice, but also stoked a deep sense of powerlessness. The EU’s rules had steadily eroded local communities’ power to decide who could, and could not, join their ranks. It was a power they were anxious to reclaim.
 

The growing realisation that the candidates chosen by both major parties were fundamentally out-of-sync with the values and aspirations of the people they purported to represent was alienating significant numbers of voters from the entire electoral process. Democracy means “power is exercised by the people”, but more and more of the British people were beginning to feel that they no longer exercised any power at all.
 

The flipside to these feelings of diminishing power and control were identifiable in that fraction of the British population who experienced their country’s membership of the EU as both liberating and empowering. Far from feeling oppressed in their working lives, these folk saw the EU as the bringer of ever more exciting opportunities. They welcomed the growing diversity of Britain’s communities and regarded migrants as exciting and valuable additions to the national mix. Nor were they alienated by the sort of people ending up in Parliament. In their eyes, at least, they were admirably representative.
 

Feeling thus ruled both sides. “Remainers” clearly believed a majority of Britons shared their positive feelings towards the EU. “Do they heck as like!”, responded the good folk of Sunderland.
 

This essay was originally posted on the Stuff website on Monday, 27 June 2016.

Four Limericks On The Friday Britain Took Her Leave.

Or Not: David Cameron's future as Britain's Prime Minister looks decidedly shaky in the aftermath of Britain's narrow, 52-48 percent, decision to leave the European Union. Cameron wagered everything on his country voting to remain in the EU - and lost. Anyone for Boris?

 

1.

 

William, with a conqueror’s grin,

Told the English: “It looks like you’re ‘In’!”

But, after one thousand years,

It’s all ending in tears.

Europe’s welcome has worn wafer thin.

 

2. 

Sheffield used to make knives, forks and spoons,

And sang all of the Left’s favourite tunes,

Until Labour’s “Remain!”,

Drove it’s voters insane,

And now UKIP is over the moon!

 

3.

 

Scotland’s voters were all shouting “Boo!”

As the Sassenachs turned England blue.

“If you all lack the brain

To vote for ‘Remain’,

Well then, fuck-it-all – we’re leaving too!” 

4.

 

Nigel Farage cried: “Look what we’ve got,

Without having to fire one shot!”

He’s forgetting the price,

That Jo Cox was shot thrice,

In the name of – come on Nigel – What?

 

These limericks were originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 24 June 2016.