To do so would mean shifting the notorious Overton Window-the sense of what was acceptable political opinion, and therefore, where the center itself could be seen to lie, dramatically-from their perspective, violently-to the left.Īt the time, there were essentially two significant factions in the Labour Party: the corporate-friendly Blairites, who controlled most of the mechanisms of power, and an ever-compromising social-democratic “soft left.” Together with the Liberal Democrats, who staked out a position between the two major parties, and “One Nation” pro-EU Conservatives, the Blairites were treated as defining the pragmatic center of British politics. Under no conditions was he now going to be treated as a legitimate national leader, let alone, potential head of government. For thirty years, Corbyn had been considered at best an entertaining gadfly. To get a sense of what happened from an American perspective, imagine the Democratic Party eliminated its presidential primary system and replaced it with a summer of public debates followed by a single vote of all members, and that, as a result, Noam Chomsky became the Democratic candidate. It is crucial here to understand that the political-journalist establishment in the UK had never, at any point, accepted the results of the 2015 leadership election that placed Corbyn at the head of the Labour party. The media treated the election largely as a referendum on the head of the opposition, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, and to some extent, it was. Let me take the two questions in reverse order. To understand why Brexit became such an issue in the first place, one must first ask why a populism of the right has so far proved more adept than the left at capitalizing on profound shifts in the nature of class relations that have affected not just the UK but almost all wealthy societies second, one must understand the uniquely nihilistic, indeed self-destructive, role of centrism in the British political scene. This explanation is true, but superficial. In 2016 they turned against the “Eurocrats,” then watched in dismay as the entire political class proceeded to engage in endless and increasingly absurd procedural ballet that appeared designed to reverse their decision. Most experienced the next forty or so years largely as a sequence of disasters. For many working-class Northerners in their sixties, the first vote they ever cast was in the Common Market referendum of 1975, in which a majority of Britons declared in favor of the European project. Why, then, such an apparently devastating victory? Why did middle-aged swing voters-particularly in the former Labour heartlands of the North-break right instead of left? The most obvious explanation is buyer’s remorse over the European Union. If conventional wisdom is correct, historically young people only begin to vote Conservative when they acquire a mortgage, or otherwise feel they have a secure position to defend within the system, which bodes ill indeed for the Tories’ future prospects. Meanwhile, the Tories’ core constituency is quite literally dying off. Proclamations of the death of British socialism, then, seem decidedly premature. This is particularly striking when one takes into consideration that the left Labour policies the young so overwhelmingly voted for in the 20 elections were ones that had been treated, even a year or two before, as so radical as to fall off the political spectrum entirely. The Center Blows Itself Up: Care and Spite in the ‘Brexit Election’īy David Graeber, the New York Review of BooksĮlectoral maps of the UK based on projected results of opinion polling from 2018 if, respectively, only over sixty-five year-olds (left) or only eighteen-to-twenty-four year-olds (right) were allowed to vote click to expand One thing is clear: the centre in British political life has imploded: “The country is now being governed by a hard-right government placed in power by its oldest citizens, in the face of the active hatred of its increasingly socialist-inclined youth.” Labour has been the party representing both their interests (the former having provided the core support for Blairism).īut their interests have increasingly diverged and the coalition frayed, setting the scene for the battles of recent years, all mediated through the Brexit lens. He goes beyond the simplistic analysis of this as a shift from manufacturing to service work, arguing that the “real story” is the phenomenal growth of professional-managerial administrator types,, on the one hand, and, of “care workers” on the other. In a long and fascinating essay David Graeber locates the underlying causes of Labour’s electoral defeat in the shifting structure of class relations in Britain.
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