Positioning The Brexit Party

The Brexit Party came second yesterday in Peterborough with 29% of the vote (on a low turn-out). Labour won with 31%. Labour and Conservatives dropped their votes from the previous election by 17% and 25% respectively. The Brexit Party has, of course, only existed a few months.

Newspaper reports suggest that the Brexit Party is positioning itself as a socially-conservative vehicle for the skilled working class. This is, I suppose, where Labour was in the nineteen fifties. There have been a flurry of economic reports showing how unconstrained immigration of low-to-medium-skilled workers undermines pay-rates and crowds indigenous workers out of housing in metropolitan areas.

---

It's easy to be mesmerised by the rolling masses of the liberal-left who propel Labour's Momentum wing, and who have flocked to the Liberal party and the Greens in the face of Labour's Brexit angst. They are clearly a sizeable electoral block, energised by the decay of the neoliberal project which once promised them glittering lives in a new, modern, rewarding, creative, hi-tech borderless world like something out of 'Friends'.

'Friends' with benefits, you might say - but now without them.

Stagnant economic growth underpinned by enduring poor profitability has eroded such prospects, although the dream lives on.

Curiously, it's the leftist déclassé professionals who are conservative, hearkening back to a roving, atomised Euroglobalist vision which has receded to an elite only and will not return. Change UK?

---

Those less-skilled workers, abandoned by Labour, are looking for new solutions. Will they find them?

If British capitalism is not going to coalesce into some pan-European economy then it will have to seek its alliances elsewhere. America beckons. It's the only other choice given patterns of trade and capital flows.

From a newly-nationalistic America (Trump is a symptom, not a cause despite all the noise from US liberals) the UK as a tied vassal-state on the borders of the EU is useful. It's their plan B in a struggle against China, Russia and occasionally Europe itself.

In such an alliance structure, the free movement of labour and the general dominance of Euroliberal ideologies are no longer so salient. Social-conservatism has some space to gain a purchase, reflecting the more communalist needs of those tied to actual places: towns and cities. The Brexit party has somewhere to grow into here, which could absorb the Brexit wing of the Tories which speaks to similar concerns and interest groups (there is a national bourgeoisie of smallish companies in the UK who are pro-Brexit or agnostic).

---

There is equal space for a socially-progressive liberal-left party (to use their own preening self-description). This is probably what Change UK thought they were doing in their more intellectual moments. In reality much more horsepower is needed to break apart existing party institutions.

But an assemblage of Labour (after disposing of its working class base) together with George Osborne-style Tories and non-sandal-wearing Liberals could make up a community of like-thinkers on the left. Its lack of real-world options beneath the rhetoric could drive it mad, though.

Perhaps we end up like America: Trumpish-Republicans vs. rainbow-alliance Democrats:  Farage/Johnson vs. Corbyn/McDonnell.

Do you like what you see?