The two things which underly all Sir Ivan's points and were too obvious to his audience to spell out are, firstly, the continued delusion among practically the entire British population, even many of the more left-wing ones, that we are a Great Power and that all other countries in the world are naturally supplicants to us, and second, the depth of "the wogs begin at Calais" British xenophobia. (The second, incidentally, is why practically all left-wing US essays on Brexit I've read are deeply confused, because it can't be understood in the context of the US anti-racist dogma that, because of international white privilege as a legacy of colonialism, ethnic/cultural bigotry between different groups of people who qualify as "white" in the US cannot possibly be relevant in the present day anywhere in the world, and anyone who suggests that it is must be denying or trying to distract from Actual Racism. And no, in relation to the most common counter-argument, British hostility to central and eastern European immigrants is not solely anti-Roma prejudice, even though that is present.)
And the Labour Party response to Brexit is horribly disappointing as well, because as I see it there's a combined effect from, a) Blair-Brown era style fear of challenging the prejudices of the White Working Class, and b) Corbyn and others tending to left opposition to the EU, which used to be primarily limited to Corbyn's generation but has had something of a revival in recent years because of the EU enforcing economic austerity on Greece et al.
But unlike the FBPE crowd on Twitter who tend to be ferociously anti-Corbyn Labour-right sympathisers, I don't think a Labour Party led by any of the non-Corbyn candidates would have been able to campaign for Remain more effectively in the referendum or to oppose Brexit more effectively afterwards. Because a big part of the reason why we had the rise of UKIP and then Brexit is the belief of the Labour Right leadership of the party under Blair and Brown that the White Working Class were somehow naturally and unchallengably racist and xenophobic, and that the best they could do was try to avoid discussing EU migration while being repugnantly cruel to non-white migrants, especially refugees, pandering to Islamophobia and wider bigot complaints about established non-Anglo-Saxon people "not integrating", and making regular genuflections to the "legitimate concerns" of working-class bigots. And when they did try to defend EU free movement during the referendum, the most they could do, due to their inability to argue for migration as a moral good, was to produce unenthusiastic economic arguments that just confirmed the belief of bigoted members of the White Working Class that EU migrants were the reason for low pay, unemployment, and housing shortages, and that the only people on the left who supported free movement were smug, hypocritical "drawing-room socialists" (I believe that's the literal translation of the German term) who approved of it because they got cheap Eastern European cleaning women (for women) or prostitutes (for men) and some new fashionable styles of ethnic restaurant.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2018-12-17 12:28 pm (UTC)And the Labour Party response to Brexit is horribly disappointing as well, because as I see it there's a combined effect from, a) Blair-Brown era style fear of challenging the prejudices of the White Working Class, and b) Corbyn and others tending to left opposition to the EU, which used to be primarily limited to Corbyn's generation but has had something of a revival in recent years because of the EU enforcing economic austerity on Greece et al.
But unlike the FBPE crowd on Twitter who tend to be ferociously anti-Corbyn Labour-right sympathisers, I don't think a Labour Party led by any of the non-Corbyn candidates would have been able to campaign for Remain more effectively in the referendum or to oppose Brexit more effectively afterwards. Because a big part of the reason why we had the rise of UKIP and then Brexit is the belief of the Labour Right leadership of the party under Blair and Brown that the White Working Class were somehow naturally and unchallengably racist and xenophobic, and that the best they could do was try to avoid discussing EU migration while being repugnantly cruel to non-white migrants, especially refugees, pandering to Islamophobia and wider bigot complaints about established non-Anglo-Saxon people "not integrating", and making regular genuflections to the "legitimate concerns" of working-class bigots. And when they did try to defend EU free movement during the referendum, the most they could do, due to their inability to argue for migration as a moral good, was to produce unenthusiastic economic arguments that just confirmed the belief of bigoted members of the White Working Class that EU migrants were the reason for low pay, unemployment, and housing shortages, and that the only people on the left who supported free movement were smug, hypocritical "drawing-room socialists" (I believe that's the literal translation of the German term) who approved of it because they got cheap Eastern European cleaning women (for women) or prostitutes (for men) and some new fashionable styles of ethnic restaurant.