Democraticunderground.com’s hoax makes us smile, but other observers of The Mail’s treatment of the refugee crisis focused on parallels with that newspaper’s inglorious past.
Sophie Brown (2015), writing for the Huffington Post UK, referred to a Daily Mail headline from 1938 – German Jews Pouring Into This Country – and cited the opening paragraphs of the relevant article:
‘The way stateless Jews and Germans are pouring in from every port of this country is becoming an outrage. I intend to enforce the law to the fullest.’
In these words, Mr Herbert Metcalde, the Old Street Magistrate yesterday referred to the number of aliens entering this country through the ‘back door’ – a problem to which The Daily Mail has repeatedly pointed.
The number of aliens entering this country can be seen by the number of prosecutions in recent months. It is very difficult for the alien to escape the increasing vigilance of the police and port authorities.
Similarities with the same newspaper’s attitude to those wishing to enter Britain from the Calais Jungle are impossible to ignore: switch asylum seekers for Jews, migrants for Germans, illegal immigrants for aliens and Home Secretary for Old Street Magistrate and the parallels are disquieting.
However distasteful we might find the ‘tidal wave’ metaphors of the pro-Brexit press, and however much we abhor the explicit racism and Islamophobia of readers’ feedback, the fact remains that in the first half of 2016 in certain areas of England medical, educational and social services were struggling to cope with the influx of EU migrants. The Lexit argument that the availability of labour from Portugal, Romania and the Baltic states had driven down wages to an unacceptable level could also be supported by statistics.
The example often cited in the media of a town in crisis is that of Wisbech in Cambridgeshire, once a tranquil market town that grew rapidly following the expansion of the EU in 2004. Today approximately one third of its 31,000 inhabitants are EU migrants, mostly from Poland, Lithuania, Romania and Latvia, while staffing levels in education, medical services and the police have remained largely unaltered. When John Harris (2014) of The Guardian visited the town two years before the referendum, he learnt of piece-work and zero-hours contracts in agriculture and food processing, recruitment from eastern Europe controlled by shady gangmasters, illegal distilling of vodka, clashes between Lithuanians and Latvians and, between 2010 and 2012, an unprecedented five murders (all the victims were East Europeans). Most disturbingly, he spoke to an unemployed 45-year-old man who was born and brought up in Wisbech, whose application for agency work in agriculture had been rejected on the grounds that his lack of knowledge of a Baltic language meant that he would be unable to communicate with workmates.
A tactical error by the Remain campaign was not to engage with people who expressed their concerns about the impact of immigration from the EU in rational, non-racist terms, and instead to adopt a self-righteous attitude in accusing all Leavers indiscriminately of racial prejudice. As noted in Chapter 2, the Labour MP and chair of Vote Leave, Gisella Stuart (2016), went so far as to say that by showing little interest in people’s worries about immigration, her party was turning itself into ‘the biggest recruiting agent for Ukip I can think of’. She added:
[People] feel there are legitimate concerns they have, and Labour are not even responding to it. If you’re an MP in a big city, immigration matters, and it is first and second generation immigrants who are concerned about immigration. Families of second and third generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent find it really difficult: they say, why do we have to jump so many hurdles just to bring in relatives for a wedding?
The Conservative Party was split over Brexit, which meant, perversely, that it remained representative of its equally split electorate. Polls prior to 23 June indicated that people from the lower socio-economic classes, Labour’s traditional electors, were those most likely to vote to leave the EU, while the overwhelming majority of Labour MPs were encouraging their constituents to vote Remain. In the final weeks before voting day, a number of commentators noted that, on immigration as well as other issues, the working class felt that Labour was no longer listening to them. Owen Jones (2016) stated bluntly: ‘If Britain crashes out of the European Union in two weeks, it will be off the backs of votes cast by discontented working-class people.’ Lisa Mckenzie (2016) also felt that the working classes were being ignored, and that within working-class communities the main concern was not immigration in itself, but the steady erosion of their security and living standards over a thirty-year period:
Working-class people in the UK can see a possibility that something might change for them if they vote to leave the EU. The women in east London and the men in the mining towns all tell me the worst thing is that things stay the same. The referendum has become a way in which they can have their say, and they are saying collectively that their lives have been better than they are today. And they are right. Shouting ‘racist’ and ‘ignorant’ at them louder and louder will not work – they have stopped listening.
Suzanne Moore (2016) saw a great deal of sanctimonious anti-racism from the bourgeois left and a total lack of communication with those living with the day-to-day reality of competing in the labour and housing markets with migrants from EU states, and the consequent crisis of the Labour Party.
That immigration issue that we never talk about? We talk about it all the time – just in different tongues. What we don’t do is listen. If we did, then the crumbling of the Labour remain vote would not be surprising. What did we see happening at the last election? What do we think happened in Scotland? The complacency of thinking that you can take working-class votes for granted is absolute condescension.
Fundamental to UKIP’s aim to take back control was the desire to make the right of residence in the UK dependent upon a demonstrable ability to contribute to the British economy, with an Australian points system often proposed as a fair method of selecting worthy candidates. This must have struck a chord with unqualified Britons competing for unskilled jobs and rented accommodation with EU migrants, and that Remain in general, and the Labour Party in particular, failed to address their concerns – or just dismissed them as the complaints of ignorant racists – was without doubt a significant factor in Leave’s victory.
Right-wing Brexiteers and their supporters in the media tended not to make too much of the issue of EU migrants, who are, of course, a source of cheap labour for employers, and focused instead on asylum seekers and other would-be migrants from outside Europe, the very immigrants that working-class Britons were less concerned about. Newspapers like The Mail and The Express endeavoured to keep their racist and Islamophobic language just the right side of the boundary leading to prosecution for incitement to racial hatred – racism lite for want of a better term – while, as we have seen, their readers’ feedback was anything but lite.
The foreign-born population of the UK is not evenly distributed throughout the land. Vargas-Silva and Rienzo (2017) report that in 2015 Northern Ireland had the lowest percentage of inhabitants born abroad (1.4 per cent) and Scotland had a lower percentage (4.3 per cent) than all English regions except for the North East. To say that this accounts for the fact that a majority of voters in Northern Ireland and Scotland opted for Remain would be ridiculously simplistic, however, given that London, where 36.8 per cent of residents were born outside the UK, also voted to stay in the EU.
Scotland is a special case, of course, since the binary choice between remaining in the EU or leaving was bound to be conditioned by the country’s relationship with another supranational union, the United Kingdom. Like many others, I expected June 2016 to produce a cautious endorsement of the status quo as had happened in Scotland two years earlier. Why that did not occur is considered in the next chapter.
9
Comparison with the Scottish independence referendum of 2014: How Project Fear worked in 2014 but not in 2016
Although the Scottish National Party (SNP) was founded in
1934, it really emerged as a major player after the Scotland Act of 1998 and the subsequent establishment of the Scottish Parliament as a devolved legislature. A turning point was the Scottish election of 2007 when the SNP finished with one seat more than Labour and thus became the largest party in the Holyrood Parliament. Four years later it added twenty-two more seats, which gave it an overall majority. At the time the SNP still only sent six MPs to Westminster, but its success in elections to the Scottish Parliament meant that the British government could hardly refuse to allow a referendum on independence even though the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democratic parties had no wish at all to see Scotland break away from the Union.
UKIP’s electoral breakthrough came in the 2015 general election when Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system restricted it to just one MP but it won 12.6 per cent of the votes cast, which under the proportional representation system would have given it eighty-two seats (Dathan 2015). In terms of popular vote but not number of seats, it had become the UK’s third largest party, and had pushed Labour into third place in many Conservative seats and the Tories into third place in many Labour-held constituencies. Just as the SNP had done in Scotland, UKIP had shaken up the traditional parties. It had taken votes from both Labour and the Conservatives, and was sufficiently irritating to David Cameron to induce him to gamble on a referendum that he, much of his party, most Labour MPs and all Lib Dems fervently hoped would not go the way Nigel Farage wished.
In 2014 the expression Project Fear was not yet in general circulation even though it was first coined by Rob Shorthouse, director of communications for the Better Together anti-independence campaign group (Gordon 2014). Eric Shaw (2014: 64–68), writing before the independence referendum and with specific reference to the Scottish Labour Party (SLP), referred instead to anxiety-arousal as one of the SLP’s three negative strategies in the campaign (the others being critical, critical scrutiny of arguments and claims made by Yes Scotland, the umbrella campaign group for independence, and attack, disparagement of opponents’ honesty and competence). Shaw’s description (ibid. 67) of the SLP’s creation of anxiety is representative of the approach adopted by the Better Together group in general, but Labour had some particularly authoritative voices arguing for maintaining the union, including the former prime minister, Gordon Brown, and his chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, both Scots.
Labour has used an anxiety-arousal strategy to foster a mood of disquiet, worry, even apprehension about the prospect of independence. Its campaign has revolved around the frequently-reiterated theme that independence constituted a perilous leap into the unknown; a gamble, a reckless step to take in an unpredictable and threatening world.
The Scottish independence debate was necessarily conducted in relation to the European Union once Brussels had clarified that a newly independent Scotland would not be able to make an immediate switch from sterling to the euro, indeed would not even be a member of the EU and would have to apply to join in the normal way. Better Together seized upon the currency issue as a key element in its anxiety-arousal strategy with warnings that it might not be feasible for Scotland to continue to use sterling while it awaited membership of the EU.
In the referendum of 18 September 2014, 55 per cent of those who voted opted for remaining part of the UK. In his analysis of the results, James Kirkup (2014) noted that a significant percentage of the SNP voters who had given the party control of the Scottish Parliament in 2011 must have voted against independence in the referendum, although he was only half convinced that the currency question was the clinching argument.
One explanation is that SNP voters took heed of chilling warnings that an independent Scotland would be unable to keep the pound and so face economic turmoil. Another is that they never wanted independence, but simply voted for the SNP at Holyrood because they believed a nationalist administration in Edinburgh would get the best deal for Scotland within the Union.
However, a Lord Ashcroft Poll, summarized by the Guardian on 20 September 2014 (Scottish independence: poll reveals who voted, how and why), revealed that 57 per cent of those who had voted against independence considered the currency question one of the two or three most important issues and that no other aspect of the debate had swayed no voters to the same extent.
Yes Scotland in 2014 had all the political parties except the SNP lined up against it, along with the financial, business and administrative establishment of the UK, and indeed Europe given that Brussels did not wish to see Scotland break away. Given the circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that as many as 45 per cent of Scots defied the anxiety-arousal strategy. In 2016 Vote Leave was a little less isolated in that, in addition to UKIP, part of the Conservative Party also campaigned vigorously for Brexit, and while the Confederation of British Industry was firmly on the side of Remain, other business leaders argued that leaving the EU would benefit medium-sized and small firms. A coordinated and continuous attempt to arouse anxiety was made, however, and Rob Shorthouse’s Project Fear label soon became a fundamental element of the language of Brexit.
During the referendum campaign the Treasury published a series of forecasts of the economic consequences of leaving the EU, all of them bleak and some bordering on the apocalyptic, which were seized upon by Remain campaigners, dismissed as scare tactics by Leave, and in the final analysis failed to instil fear in the hearts and minds of voters. The strategy backfired because it focused exclusively on worst-case scenarios, glossed over the fact that trying to predict how markets will react to a major political upheaval is anything but an exact science, and once translated from economic to political discourse, was expressed with a level of hyperbole that provoked more mirth than anxiety. Six months after the referendum, the Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge published its analysis of the Treasury’s assessments: the study found that the forecasts regarding employment, wage levels, affordable housing and the prospect of reduced immigration were unduly pessimistic, while on the issue of trade deals the Treasury’s warnings had been ‘very flawed and very partisan’ (Hope 2017). Leavers also had the advantage of being able to remind everyone that in 1998 gloomy predictions had been made about the consequences of Britain’s decision to keep sterling, but by the spring of 2016 not even the most enthusiastic Remainer proposed joining the eurozone.
Early on in the referendum campaign Martin Temple, chairman of the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF), warned that leaving the EU would be tantamount to stepping into an ‘abyss of uncertainty and risk’ (Watt 2016). Anatole Kaletsky (2016), chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, then pitched in to say that what Boris Johnson was pleased to call Project Fear was actually just common sense. When in February 2016 the government published a document entitled The process for withdrawing from the European Union on negotiation procedures in what was still considered the unlikely event of a vote to leave the EU, the Daily Mail was quick to rename the report ‘Dave’s Dodgy Dossier’ (though it was signed by the then Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond) and to describe its content as ‘lurid claims’ and ‘cynical scaremongering’ (Doyle 2016).
As opinion polls showed that support for Brexit was gradually increasing, attempts to generate fear intensified, from a prediction that leaving the EU would result in a £3 rise in the price of a packet of cigarettes (Tapsfield 2016) to a shift in emphasis from economics to security, and rather hysterical warnings about the danger of war in Europe. In a speech delivered on 9 May, David Cameron (2016) cited the Treasury’s estimate that leaving the EU could cost every British household up to £4,300 by 2030, but later switched to ‘the strength and security of our nation’, ‘the character of an island nation which has not been invaded for almost a thousand years’, and after references to Blenheim, Trafalgar, Waterloo, the Great War, ‘our lone stand in 1940’ and ‘the Few who saved this country in its hour of mortal danger’, advised voters that ‘when terrorists are planning to kill and maim people on British streets, the closest possible secu
rity cooperation is far more important than sovereignty in its purest theoretical form’. Unfortunately for Mr Cameron, details of his speech had been leaked to the Daily Mail some hours beforehand, which allowed Slack and Peev (2016) to lampoon the content in an online article warning that ‘Europe risks war and genocide if Britain votes to leave EU’. Shortly after the speech, the Daily Mirror used the headline ‘Brexit could trigger World War Three, warns David Cameron’ (Glaze and Bloom 2016), while Philip Johnston (2016) in The Telegraph noted that the prime minister’s ‘warnings of European disintegration and evocations of Churchill and Marlborough’ were an attempt to mobilize the 15–20 per cent of the electorate who, according to the polls, had not yet decided how to vote.
In the final run up to voting day Stephen Pollard (2016) for The Express could amuse himself with ironic comments upon the escalation of Project Fear now that leading figures in European institutions had entered the fray.
Forget David Cameron’s warning that we would cause World War Three if we leave the EU, bonkers as that scare tactic was. Forget the idea that we would suddenly be plunged into a recession from which there will be no escape. In fact, forget all the nonsense the Remain camp have spouted as they desperately try to stop the British people voting to leave.
Because according to Donald Tusk, the former Polish prime minister who is now president of the European Council, if we dare to leave the EU we will destroy civilisation itself. Speaking to a German newspaper, he said: ‘As a historian I fear Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also Western political civilisation in its entirety.’ Yup.
In the same article Pollard claimed to have learnt that David Cameron had secured an assurance from the gaffe-prone Jean-Claude Juncker that he would not make any public pronouncements on the Brexit debate, and that the president of the European Commission had agreed to hold his tongue but with the caveat that he would intervene if the polls indicated that Leave were in front during the final week. For Pollard this held out the prospect that ‘however bonkers Project Fear’s warnings may have been to date, the next week is likely to make even Mr Tusk’s words seem sane’.
THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT Page 11