Mathew d’Ancona is a columnist in the London Evening Standard and the Guardian. He is also a bigot.
In the Evening Standard today he characterises the people on the other side of the referendum vote as xenophobes. It must be very comforting to this moral guardian of the nation to blame the ‘breakdown in the consensus’ on bigotry. But d’Ancona is guilty of lazy thinking – as a result of which he jumps to conclusions about his opponents. Is that not the definition of bigotry?
He harks back to those halcyon days before the referendum when all was sweetness and light in his ivory tower. The ignorant masses used to mill about outside his privileged environment and were content with their lot. “For decades there was something close to a political consensus that the most important metric [sic] was economic prosperity. A wealthy nation was essential both to the aspirations of individual households and the funding of public services.”
And yet he fails to even consider the possibility that it might be a lack of prosperity that drives the rejection of the status quo. Perhaps it was that frustration which expressed itself in the vote to Leave the EU.
Out here, outside his ivory tower, where ordinary people live, it is obvious that the economic prosperity he values is disappearing. For 10 years workers have seen huge sums spent on banking and finance, even huger sums spent on quantitive easing, while the services they rely on are underfunded. Education. Tax credits. Care for the elderly. Care for the vulnerable.
Mr d’Ancona tells us immigration is a net benefit to the economy. If he is right (and on this point I believe he is) then we should be asking why the economy is not improving as a result of the additional wealth created by our new compatriots. It is time to put your brain into gear and work out why people are anxious. Or you could just be lazy and put it all down to xenophobia.
You might also explain the Trump phenomenon as xenophobia.
But then you have to ask yourself whether it is just a coincidence that xenophobia is on the rise in the UK, in the USA, and, we might add, in Italy, France, Hungary, Poland. All just coincidence?
Workers across the USA and Europe see their economic conditions worsening. They are not convinced by the statistics. In the UK we are told that wages are rising faster than inflation. And we ask, ‘Whose wages are rising? Because it bloody well isn’t mine’. We are told that unemployment is at an all-time low. And we ask, what kind of jobs are being created? Anybody who is made redundant today knows they have little chance of getting a comparable position in the immediate future. They risk finding themselves in low-pay or casual labour. Yes there are jobs. But what kind of jobs?
We all know that the Tories decided to steal billions from the welfare budget when they started to introduce Universal Credit. Even Tories knew it, and Ian Duncan-Smith quit the government in protest.
And despite all this evidence of a worsening economic situation driving the rejection of the status quo, Mr d’Ancona needs to convince himself that his gut instinct, to despise the lower orders, is right.
He needs evidence to back up his prejudices. Liberals need evidence to justify their prejudices. And they find their justifications easily because they are too lazy to think things through. Here is his evidence.
‘In June 2017, a report collated from the British Social Attitudes survey showed that the most significant factor in the leave vote was anxiety about the number of people coming to the UK. A comprehensive study published by Nuffield College in April drew similar conclusions about the salience of immigration in attitudes to Brexit.’
‘Anxiety about the number of people coming to the UK’ is, for him, the same thing as xenophobia. Forget about the commonly repeated statements by people who expressed this anxiety. How many times have we heard Leave voters explain they are worried that the infrastructure cannot cope. Perhaps what underlies this anxiety is a realisation that the economy is getting worse.
D’Ancona’s mindset is so complacently ensconced in his liberal bourgeois environment he cannot even imagine a world different from the comfortable world that surrounds him. He asserts, without any effort to adduce ‘evidence’:
“We live in a world defined by the economic, social and cultural interdependence of nation states. And those who promise that leaving the EU will deliver “control” are really promising something quite specific: a social and cultural reboot. As well as being morally contemptible, of course, this is also a complete impossibility.”
A social and cultural reboot is not an impossibility, Mr d’Ancona. It is just unimaginable to people like you.
There are millions of people outside your circle for whom a reboot is exactly what they feel is needed. And for many of them the referendum was a chance to say so. We told you what we think. Ignore it at your peril.