Britain’s EU Problem is a London Problem

Britain’s EU Problem is a London Problem

Huge swathes of England outside of London voted to Leave the European Union, because of a feeling of exclusion that has been growing since Thatcher’s 1980s.

Yesterday the UK voted to leave the European Union after thirty years of a halting, sometimes noble, often messy experiment in international cooperation. In my circles—professional, well-educated, Cambridge and London—the principal reaction was incredulity. How could this happen? Who could want this? A natural reaction. In my electoral district, 75 percent voted to Remain. In the hip parts of London where my daughter lives, a similar result. But a look at the electoral map showed (inevitably, given that a substantial majority of England—though only a narrow majority of the UK—voted to Leave) that huge swathes of England outside of London voted by similar proportions to Leave—the poorer areas on the East and South coasts, depressed former industrial districts in the North, though also more prosperous parts of the West Country and the Midlands.

In shorthand, Britain’s EU problem is a London problem. London, a young, thriving, creative, cosmopolitan city, seems the model multicultural community, a great European capital. But it is also the home of all of Britain’s elites—the economic elites of “the City” (London’s Wall Street, international rather than European), a nearly hereditary professional caste of lawyers, journalists, publicists, and intellectuals, an increasingly hereditary caste of politicians, tight coteries of cultural movers-and-shakers richly sponsored by multinational corporations. It’s as if Hollywood, Wall Street, the Beltway, and the hipper neighborhoods of New York and San Francisco had all been mashed together. This has proved to be a toxic combination.

For the rest of the country has felt more and more excluded, not only from participation in the creativity and prosperity of London, but more crucially from power. That gap had begun to yawn dangerously in Thatcher’s 1980s, when deindustrialization in the North and the finance and property boom in the South East meant that growing inequality acquired a grave geographical component. London was not the sole beneficiary. There are pockets of London-like entitlement scattered all over the country—in university towns like Brighton, Cambridge, and Bristol, in select neighbourhoods of Manchester and Leeds. But the big money—and all those elites—remained firmly in London. In recent decades it has felt as if the whole country had been turned upside down and shaken, until most of the wealth and talent had pooled in the capital. One of the most striking features of this period has been the turnaround in London’s educational performance; in the 1990s, it had among the worst educational outcomes in Britain, today it has the best. Some of this is owing to immigration—striving immigrant groups are helping London’s schools to thrive. But some of it is owing to a different kind of migration—talented and ambitious young people from all over the country thronging to London to teach. London’s gain is the rest of the country’s loss.

And the rest of the country has felt it, particularly since the economic crash of 2008. Bankers and politicians were blamed for that crash, but the rest of the country paid the price. Bank bailouts lumbered the government with huge new liabilities, and the Liberal-Conservative coalition vowed to cut the central budget by 25 percent. “Quantitative easing” pumped cash into the economy but most of it ended up in bankers’ hands. Not only bankers but politicians were apparently “too big to fail.” Public opinion began to grow sensitive to this in ways that metropolitan pundits found bizarre and irrational. In 2009 an expenses scandal swept through Parliament. Most inflammatory were MPs’ claims for expensive second homes in London. Many MPs maintained a nominal “main home” in their distant constituencies, where they spent little time, and then claimed hundreds of thousands of pounds to support a metropolitan lifestyle. They were puzzled; where else would anyone want to live?

Where was the Labour Party in all this? To many people Tony Blair’s New Labour party looked indistinguishable from the rest of the metropolitan elite. A lot of its leaders were professional politicians parachuted into Northern working-class heartland seats. Tony Blair himself represented a former coal-mining community, Sedgefield. His henchman Peter Mandelson represented nearby Hartlepool, a former shipbuilding centre. His successor Ed Miliband represented Doncaster North, at the heart of the Northern coal and steel belt. All went to Oxford, all have spent their entire adult lives in politics, all live in London—wherever their “main home” was nominally located. Recently Labour tried to break with this legacy. Last year it elected a rank outsider, Jeremy Corbyn, as its leader, on a wave of anti-elitist revulsion. Corbyn stood for “Old Labour,” a politics of class and welfare and redistribution. Or did he? Corbyn too is a Londoner, representing a deeply bohemian inner London suburb, Islington North; he was my MP for ten years. He too has spent his lifetime in politics—not in think tanks or PR outfits, but in a range of London-centered “movement” groups, for nuclear disarmament, Irish republicanism, Palestinian liberation. He came to power on a wave of youth and student enthusiasm. Undoubtedly he does represent young, creative, multicultural London. But from Sedgefield, Hartlepool, and Doncaster that London doesn’t look all that different from the London of fat-cat bankers and thieving politicians.

It was not foreordained that this wave of populism would find its channel in a revulsion against Europe. Scotland has charted a different path. There a left-of-centre Scottish National Party has inherited most of the alienated Labour vote by combining social democracy, a pro-Europe stance, and anti-metropolitan feeling, offering an alternative local democracy in the form of Scottish nationalism. Most of the highest votes for Remain came either from London or from Scotland. One could just about imagine a barnstorming economic populism in the Bernie Sanders mode galvanizing the former Labour vote in deprived English districts as well. But despite his nominal leftism that was not Corbyn’s style, which is low-key, stiff, puritanical, even self-righteous. What is left of an old, locally rooted Labour party has been doing its best—inner-city Liverpool came out solidly for Remain—but it too feels remote from a party apparatus and MPs centered in London. It’s notable that since Corbyn’s election a number of prominent Northern Labour MPs have signalled a return to local government—Andy Burnham is contemplating a run for Mayor of Manchester, Luciana Berger and Steve Rotheram for Mayor of Liverpool.

The Remain campaign undoubtedly contributed to widening this divide. Rather like the New York Times’ attitude to Trump, Remain thought it could laugh off Leave, or dazzle it with “facts.” A very large part of the Remain campaign was focused on troupes of “experts”—investment experts, science and university experts, fiscal policy experts—signing collective petitions and open letters declaring their loyalties to Europe. This played directly into anti-elitist sentiment. A very telling point late in the EU referendum campaign came when Michael Gove, one of the right-wing Conservative leaders of the Leave side, was quoted as saying that “people in this country have had enough of experts.” Much fun was made of this remark. But it touched a nerve. The next day a leaflet came through my letterbox from Remain. “Find out what trusted experts say”: a range of views from left to right backing Europe, including a trade unionist, a military chief, a scientist, a banker, and a billionaire entrepreneur. All live in London and the southeast except for one Scot and the billionaire, who lives in the tax haven of the British Virgin Islands. That billionaire, Sir Richard Branson, took out full-page ads in all the major papers in the last days of the campaign, extolling Europe. This might have done further damage to the Remain cause.

On the surface, immigration was undoubtedly the leading anti-Europe issue. But immigration also cuts two ways. London is by far the most multicultural city in Britain and one of the most diverse cities in the world—at the last census, 37 percent of its population came from outside the UK, 25 percent from outside Europe, and only 45 percent were UK-born whites. The presence of migrants can stimulate pro-European feeling (and, as we’ve seen, better educational and cultural outcomes). In conditions of austerity, deprivation and unemployment, however, the presence of migrants can stimulate the opposite—nativism, scapegoating, depression. Some of the biggest Leave votes (as in 2015 the best results for the UK Independence Party) were piled up in Eastern agricultural communities, elderly, with poor educational provision, and shifting to a low-wage economy; here EU migrants from Poland and elsewhere are doing a lot of the agricultural jobs vacated by young English people who have moved elsewhere, and soaking up a lot of anti-immigrant feeling from older natives who have stayed behind. But equally some of the biggest Leave votes were registered in depressed former industrial centers in the North with few immigrants. Sunderland, a hotspot of Leave voting, has fewer than 4 percent foreign-born residents, well below the national average of 12 percent. Here complaining about immigration seems a clear proxy for complaining about social exclusion.

How much of this is about inequality? The widening of the North-South divide is surely rooted in inequality. But the events of the last ten years, which have brought us to this sorry pass, have not been only about inequality in brute economic terms, they have also been about a sense of culture and community. Although the gap between the top 1 percent and the rest has continued to widen, the gap between the top 5 or 10 percent and the rest has not. Many people’s living standards have been haltingly recovering and inequality is not necessarily becoming more visible for most people in everyday life; if anything, the super-rich are becoming less visible in carefully tended London enclaves. It was not only depressed areas in the North and East but also other, more prosperous parts of Wales, the Midlands, and the West who felt resentment at remote and self-aggrandizing elites (in remoter Brussels as well as London), at the evisceration of local democracy, at what they saw as corruption at the very top—and voted Leave. A different, more durable and threatening kind of inequality is also at stake here. A majority of people around the United Kingdom are feeling like non-people, un-citizens, their lives jerked about like marionettes by wire-pullers far away. In those circumstances, very bad things indeed can be expected.

Peter Mandler teaches British history at Cambridge University. He lives in Cambridge and London and voted Remain, so he is probably part of the problem.

[contentblock id=subscribe-plain]