The Guardian UK>>> Four days, two elections, same challenge, different outcome. These are the facts that every globalist, leftwing and progressive voter must look in the face as they survey the Tory victory last week and the Macron victory on Sunday.
If you dig down into the polling analysis from France, the demographics of Le Pen’s support mirror those that drove the Brexit vote here. Low education, short lifespan, pessimism about the future and blue-collar work: these are the predictors of voting far right in France or Brexit here.
But there, the paths diverge. Last Thursday, Theresa May captured enough of this low-income, low-hope vote from Ukip to secure a Conservative victory in the local elections. Macron, by contrast scored 55% and above even in communities in the lowest rankings for skilled work, education and wellbeing.
Yes – even in many of the tight-knit ex-mining communities and factory suburbs in northern France where St Joan of the White People is feted on arrival – Macron was able to score 55% or above. In part, this is because of the Front National’s historic association with anti-semitism and Pétainism.
But above all it was because Macron confronted racism, stigmatised it, and offered hope. He constructed an alliance of the freemarket elite and left voters on that basis. And however vacuous and unachievable his reform programme may be, it has given French democracy, Europeanism and globalism another chance.
Contrast that with Britain. Before we kick Corbyn, Sturgeon, the Lib Dems or the electorate over last week’s poll shocker, we must first kick the interlocking networks that form the British establishment.
Since Brexit, they have seemed bereft of strategy or belief. No vice-chancellor of any university thinks hard Brexit is a good idea. Sure, there are a few maverick CEOs who do, but most business leaders want the minimum possible disruption to single market access after Brexit. Most employers want to keep the workforce global and mobile. Most lawyers want human rights to be inalienable and universal, not subject to somebody’s election manifesto.
Until last Thursday, the establishment could be forgiven for believing that Theresa May’s rhetoric of a “hard Brexit or no deal” was just that. Or that her negotiating stance with Europe would be emollient behind closed doors even if brusque in public. After all, if you parade around Britain asking people to “lend me your votes”, the assumption might be you want those votes to come from all parts of the political spectrum.
In fact, last Thursday, it was overwhelmingly Ukip voters who lent the Conservatives their votes – and for a very obvious reason. Given the chance to disavow the “no deal” threat, May reiterated it. Given the chance to show British sang-froid in the face of Juncker’s leaks to the German press, May pressed the confrontation button. Soon she will reiterate her policy to cut migration to tens of thousands, starving businesses and the NHS of vital staff.
But the votes that switched from Ukip to the Conservatives will come at a price. The bargain-basement xenophobia and anti-foreigner rhetoric that May, along with others, used at last autumn’s Tory conference is attracting a new kind of member as well as new kind of voter.
If you have made the political journey from voting Labour to voting Brexit, then Ukip and now Tory, you have done so for all the reasons you tell the pollsters, over and over: you want the EU migrants gone; Britain to make a destructive break with Europe; and “your country back”. Saying who you want it back from is to be done through all the covert signifiers of racism in modern Britain, but we get the picture.
It is to the Labour leadership’s credit that it has refused to play the migration card, or resort to the nebulous rhetoric of “patriotism” as a slice of the working class slipped over to the nationalist right. As we saw in 2015, even progressives such as Ed Miliband were pushed by the party machine into “tough on migration” slogans.
The same voices within Labour now echo the demands of its failed West Midlands mayoral candidate Sion Simon for “a clearer, stronger message about traditional values like patriotism, hard work and a defence of decency, law and order”.
You can be certain that these values will be pushed by those who want to unseat Corbyn after 8 June – so let’s decode them. The Labour movement has always been a line drawn through working-class communities in favour of internationalism and tolerance against dumb patriotism and theories of racial supremacy.
For politicians including Simon, the phrase “hard work and decency” is code for leaving welfare recipients to rot; “law and order” code for the kind of policing that criminalises people from marginal communities. If they are not, why would Simon expect these codewords to swing Ukippers back to Labour?
Macron showed us another way. You confront xenophobia and racism; you attack the dream of economic isolation as a reactionary fantasy; you lead the nation by representing the cultural values of its skilled and educated people, and the young.
But Macron won because the French establishment woke up. It realised that, given the options, an alliance with the left was better than an alliance with the ultra right.
It is time the British establishment did the same. Either the Tory leadership has adopted hard Brexit and xenophobia as a lie, or it means business.
If the latter, it is not enough for liberal Conservatives from the Cameron-Osborne generation simply to move on to better jobs. They should now lend their votes to the progressive parties.
I wish those parties were more united and better led. I wish they would admit what every voter knows – that they can only govern in coalition with each other until the electoral system is fixed.
But we can sort that out later. What we cannot sort out later is if the Ukip-Tory coalition gets a landslide, and the Brexit negotiations become a flag-waving exercise against an external foe. Because nice as that will seem in the House of Commons, it will have dire implications for the atmosphere in every multi-ethnic community in Britain.
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