http://www.thetimes.co.uk/

june 24 2016

 

United Kingdom has never been more divided

By philip collins

 

The campaign was a ten-week horror show that exposed fault lines by age, region, class and education. Now we have to heal

 

The most divisive and least edifying of political campaigns is done. Every day of the ten-week EU referendum seemed like a political eternity. Mercy be that the dismal thing is over. Now, with truth such an obvious casualty, it is time to turn our attention to reconciliation. I know, funnily enough, what David Beckham and John Barnes think of the EU but neither Mo Farah nor Jessica Ennis-Hill ventured a view. I’d like to know. The spirit of that glorious August night so long ago in 2012 when Jessica fell to the track and cried to heaven and Mo sprinted down the straight seems lost to us now. This was a referendum that gathered every divide in the nation and put it up on the podium.

The supreme irony is that the whole event was conceived as a bridge between two outcrops in the Conservative Party. It was meant to settle a dispute, not worsen it. There was never a pressing need for this referendum. No treaty change warrants it. The renegotiation was a pretext so obvious I don’t think newspapers should have reported it. This was a political fix, pure and simple, by a prime minister who pandered to his obsessive wing. Every concession he offered made the next concession inevitable. Duly, he declared the referendum and his friends put the argument that he could do no other.

Mr Cameron should reflect with a heavy heart on what he unleashed. There is nothing wrong with serious argument and let’s not be too pious. Witty invective is part of the show. Besides, conflict is the essence of politics. Reasonable people disagree and politics is how we arrive at a verdict.

Not that there were many reasonable people on show. Boris Johnson was too evidently playing an internal game, Michael Gove must have cringed at being held hostage by racists and Andrea Leadsom was on television enough to become wildly overrated. For my money, Gisela Stuart or Ruth Davidson should be the next prime minister, with an honourable mention to Sadiq Khan. The standard of debate was lamentable. Horrible.

That is not the worst of it, though. Neither is it all that worrying, in itself, if the country splits down the middle on a serious question. The worst upshot of the referendum campaign is the nasty things that crawled out when we looked under the stone. This was a campaign that revealed a Britain divided class against class, region against region, electorate against politicians, nativist against cosmopolitan, old against the young, rich against poor and London against the rest.

We divide by generation. Two-thirds of voters under 35 want to stay in. Sixty per cent of those over 55 want to leave. We divide by class. People in the professions want to stay by 62 per cent to 38, while 63 per cent of unskilled workers want to leave. We divide by education. University graduates prefer staying to going by 70-30. We divide by attitude. The In voters cite inequality as a major concern; Out voters talk about immigration. We even split musically. YouGov found that Remain voters are more likely to prefer Blur over Oasis than their Eurosceptic counterparts. Somewhere in the corridors of a red-brick university a researcher is conducting fieldwork to show that Strictly fans are for In and switchers to X Factor are for out.

Most of all now, we divide by place. London, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales overwhelmingly want to stay put. The north and the east of England have had enough and the east and west Midlands aren’t wild about Europe either. London and the other nations together divide 60-40 for Remain. The rest of England is 53-47 for getting out. The good people of Havering are doing nothing of the sort. They want out. Gravesham, Boston, King’s Lynn and Mansfield will vote to leave, emphatically. In Tendring the thing they are tendering is resignation.

 

Corbyn has been horribly exposed as incompetent and unpersuasive

 

If this referendum falls nevertheless for Remain it will have been a victory won on the Celtic periphery, in Oxford and Cambridge and in London. It will be a victory for the university towns and the professional classes of Bristol, Edinburgh and Brighton and the inner London boroughs which, under Jeremy Corbyn, will soon be the only core vote Labour has left. This is the In crowd which likes cosmopolitan Britain. The voters for exit feel they are victims of exactly the same trends and the name they give to their discontent is “immigration”.

This is the modern condition of England question. If Britain votes to stay in the EU there is going to be a reckoning for the Labour Party in its very core. Labour voters have struggled to see any benefits from open markets and the free flow of people. The Labour leader, Mr Corbyn, has been horribly exposed as incompetent and unpersuasive. He has nothing to say even to his own tribe.

In the original The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1845, Friedrich Engels argued that the industrial revolution, which had enriched the owners of capital, had done nothing for the people who lived and worked in the industrial cities. The same message is coming back from the post-industrial revolution, and Labour has to find a way to respond.

So do the Conservatives, who have managed, by accident, to create two nations. For all Mr Cameron’s faltering modernisation, the 2015 election ended up with a red north and a blue south. We are back to Sybil, the novel that Disraeli wrote in 1845 as a response to Engels and in which he coins the phrase “two nations”. If Mr Cameron survives his latest reckless gamble he will have to seek to heal. I am not interested in his tedious party management. It is the country that matters. Mr Cameron’s victory speech should concentrate as much on the substantial minority who voted to leave as the slightly bigger number who voted to stay. Much as he will be loath ever to broach the topic again he must begin a programme of European reform. More than anything else he needs to break down the question of “immigration” into its constituent parts and offer something to those people of England who did speak but whose voice was not quite heard.

Mr Cameron thought he was clever enough to build a bridge in the Tory party. That’s why we went through that ten-week horror show. His edifice has turned out to be a pier instead, which drops into the sea. James Joyce once brilliantly described a pier as “a disappointed bridge”. The British people are not known for jumping into the sea for no good reason. They are conservatives even if most of the Conservative Party isn’t. But the fact that close to half the nation was happy to take the leap should tell the prime minister that he is leaving his successor a big question. The condition of England question.