Legitimate Concerns

Ben Wildsmith

In February, it will be ten years since David Cameron announced the Brexit referendum.

In a world that was yet to see a Trump presidency, the UK was, it turned out, an early indicator of how world politics was changing.

The chaotic sequence of events that have engulfed us since then make it difficult to remember how different attitudes were at a time that seems simultaneously like yesterday and a lifetime ago.

From the instant the referendum was called, it seemed that the fragile accommodation of beliefs that made our democracy viable started to tear apart. The tone of political debate became harsher and more confrontational as the binary nature of the referendum seemed to settle over all of national life.

You were one of us or one of them whether you liked it or not. Tribal intransigence that had characterised the broken politics of Northern Ireland for so long became normalised across the nations of the UK.

Inadequacy

When the Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in broad daylight by a right-wing extremist who shouted, ‘Britain First!’ as he attacked her, the referendum campaign was briefly paused. Our politicians revealed their inadequacy for the times as they mouthed platitudes in her honour, before leading us all back into the foaming torrents that had led us to that shameful day.

If ever a point of inflection presented itself it was then, but we lacked anyone with the talent to articulate it.

In the new politics, data was for nerds; losers who lacked the guts to feel a national moment. Every painstaking argument about loss of trade and increased bureaucracy could be swept away with a single word that nobody was able to define: ‘sovereignty’.

For men and women of urgency, the bean-counting didn’t matter. The stuff of nationhood lay not in the prosperity of communities, rather, it flowed in the blood. Spreadsheets and forecasts would wither before the roar of the lion, just you wait…

Bigotry

Somewhere in the kaleidoscopic weirdness of those days, accusing somebody of bigotry became more taboo than being bigoted. ‘Legitimate concerns about immigration’ took on the clothes of religious belief. If somebody expressed them, however aggressively, it was their right to do so. To accuse somebody of cloaking racism in this way was to marginalise them for their beliefs. How dare you?

If nobody seemed quite sure what sovereignty was back then, we got the message loud and clear this week. The avuncular tones of good old Uncle Nigel, the bloke down the pub who just wanted a fag, a pint, and the odd racy joke, were replaced with a solemn explanation of what this was really about from day one.

Explaining that a Reform UK government would deport 600 000 people, which is nearly 1% of the population, as many as live in Bristol or Glasgow, Farage laid out what we should be ready to sacrifice. Membership of the ECHR, as formulated by Churchill, would go, as would the 1998 Human Rights Bill. To be rid of these people, we should all be ready to lose our human rights and any mechanism for challenging how we are treated by the state. To be rid of migrant hotels, we should be ready to accept the construction of concentration camps on our soil. To expedite deportations, we should be willing to send our tax money directly to the Taliban as a bribe.

‘Legitimate concerns’

That is what was meant by ‘sovereignty’ and how broadly the scope of ‘legitimate concerns’ was drawn by those who exhorted us to leave the EU. That leaving it reduced the nation to penury, with IMF intervention now widely predicted, was not just irrelevant to this project, it was welcome. As the screw has turned on our standards of living, so humanity has escaped like steam under pressure from vulture capitalists whose interests all this has served.

In my view, Farage made his first serious mistake this week. There is a sizeable minority who support this undeliverable, and shameful plan, but it’s anathema to the majority in the centre, not because we’ve been brainwashed but because it is a moral outrage.

Members of the minority will show up, as they always do, with their laughing emojis, their sexual obsessions, and their transparent hatred – undoubtedly in the comments under this article. They can’t be persuaded, they never could. Now is the time to condemn, to shun, and to ostracise. If that seems harsh, particularly if you are related to them, well sorry, but decent people have legitimate concerns.