Radio Free never accepts money from corporations, governments or billionaires – keeping the focus on supporting independent media for people, not profits. Since 2010, Radio Free has supported the work of thousands of independent journalists, learn more about how your donation helps improve journalism for everyone.

Make a monthly donation of any amount to support independent media.





Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’

The more difficult conceptual problem is the categorisation of the demographic groups themselves. There is obviously very good reason not to categorise Leavers as racists tout court, since voters support Brexit for a connected set of reasons including sovereignty and democracy as well as immigration control. And of course, unevenly-held authoritarian and reactionary attitudes on a range of issues apart from race and immigration contribute to the political cleavage around which this identity has formed.

Yet we know that the core attitudes which lie behind the Brexit identity cluster together: as Ford, Goodwin and David Cutts put it a decade ago, explaining UKIP’s advance, ‘hostility to one out-group tends to correlate with hostility to others; those who dislike immigrants tend to dislike racial minorities and to dislike the “foreigners” from the EU encroaching on British politics.’

Cummings honed his alarmist appeal on immigration because he himself believed that a sizeable part of his electorate was open to racist messaging, and in the light of the outcome it is difficult to believe that he was wrong. Nationalist, racial and ethnic attitudes appear more salient than, for example, attitudes to gender, on which more white school-leaver voters have liberal leanings. In this light, terms like ‘identity conservatives’ (or ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ conservatives), which are widely used by political scientists, have a euphemistic ring, and something like ‘authoritarian racial-nationalists’ would be analytically tighter.

Echoing the earlier point about class, there is also some reason to question Brexitland’s categorisation of anti-Brexiters as ‘identity liberals’, because Virdee has shown that a distinct working-class anti-racism developed from the 1970s, impacting the labour movement; it is not only graduates who provided the stimulus to resist ethnic nationalism. It is also important to acknowledge that ‘ethnic minorities’, while generally reacting against Conservative and Brexiter racism, are divided, and that both anti-Muslim and anti-European hositlity have considerable purchase among minority voters. (However these are qualifications which Sobolewska and Ford go some way to recognising.)

The racist-nationalist future

Sobolewska and Ford write tentatively in the conclusion to this book of the potential for ‘identity politics’ to wane after Brexit. The Tories’ electoral dominance, they suggest, ‘would be rapidly destabilised if identity conservative voters’ attention returned to economic issues following the resolution of Brexit and the introduction of new controls on immigration. (p. 336) It has indeed been destabilised, by the Covid crisis, but this does not appear likely to end the Conservatives’ racial-nationalist approach. On the contrary, the failure of the Johnson regime’s pandemic response and the additional threat which the end of the Brexit transition poses to the UK economy and society have already led it to double down on racism, hyping the threat posed by small numbers of helpless asylum seekers reaching England in small boats, and nationalism, with the aggressive display of its willingness to defy the EU by breaking international law. As the government faces an unprecedented set of economic as well as health challenges, it appears that nationalism and racism are the most reliable of their diminishing political resources, likely to be appealed to as widely and frequently as possible.

Print
Print Share Comment Cite Upload Translate Updates

Leave a Reply

APA

Martin Shaw | Radio Free (2020-10-26T13:01:33+00:00) Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/

MLA
" » Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’." Martin Shaw | Radio Free - Monday October 26, 2020, https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/
HARVARD
Martin Shaw | Radio Free Monday October 26, 2020 » Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’., viewed ,<https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/>
VANCOUVER
Martin Shaw | Radio Free - » Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’. [Internet]. [Accessed ]. Available from: https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/
CHICAGO
" » Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’." Martin Shaw | Radio Free - Accessed . https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/
IEEE
" » Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’." Martin Shaw | Radio Free [Online]. Available: https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/. [Accessed: ]
rf:citation
» Political racism and the making of ‘Brexitland’ | Martin Shaw | Radio Free | https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/26/political-racism-and-the-making-of-brexitland/ |

Please log in to upload a file.




There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.

You must be logged in to translate posts. Please log in or register.