Leave Logic
The EU Referendum was just over a year ago, but the political fall-out from the result will reverberate for decades.
There is plenty that has already been said and there is plenty still left to say about the position we are in and the further damage to expect when we leave the EU. As a perilously weak government negotiate the terms for leaving, I would like to, instead, focus on what is not a stretch to say was a key and pivotal factor to the referendum outcome— a deeply flawed logic that voting Leave was a vote against the establishment.
The anti-establishment argument for Leave goes something like this: “I don’t like the establishment and I don’t like being told what to do. And those that belittle my reasoning and decision are not respecting my democratic decision.”
In fact, that is a close summation of my very good friend’s rationale when I was debating with him over these matters last year. There are three clear problems with the logic, which I will examine here.
1. Voting Brexit was a vote for the establishment
The origins of the term the establishment and its evolution in meaning are not entirely clear, but roughly speaking, it denotes a group or set of individuals that wield significant authority, influence and/or power, regardless of the class they’ve come from.
Importantly, the establishment usually support or encourage and/or benefit from a system of gross inequality at the expense of a wider majority. The establishment support and encourage, amongst other things:
· Unregulated free market (but often only in so much as when it favours big business or extremely wealthy individuals).
· Mass (and ineffective) privatisation, often accompanied by limited or decreased accountability or deregulation.
· Scaling down of the state, often with the view that the free market does the services that the state or local government provides better and cheaper (but also often without that view because they might see the privatisation of services as less efficient but stand to gain personally by supporting them).
· Selling off of public assets unnecessarily, and usually under price
· Low tax, tax breaks and tax loopholes to the wealthiest individuals and to corporations.
· Erosion of workers rights, erosion of access to services and opportunities for justice.
· Attacks on welfare — often reducing it, damaging it and even administrating it through ineffective or malicious privatisation.
· Transfer of wealth from the many to the few
· A politicised use of fear of crime and terrorism to strip people of rights, increase military presence abroad and move towards a more authoritarian system.
· Exploitation of foreign resources for corporate gain.
· Using immigration and, by proxy, immigrants to disguise their own failings and to justify doing all/some of the above
· Links and services to and from elitist individuals or groups on financial, family, and/or friendship grounds.
· Profiting from supporting those systems (either financially or from preferential treatment, including better press coverage)
That is not by any means an exclusive list, but it does, I hope, help us to have a current understanding of what we mean by a phrase that often seems increasingly vague in its use.
The establishment are, roughly speaking, the gatekeepers to fairness and equality, and the orchestrators of a continuing cycle of injustice.
We must accept that there are degrees to which someone may be deemed to be part of the establishment or have establishment views. Basically, the more unequivocal their advocacy and support of this system, the more establishment they are. But we have to also take into consideration their position of authority and power within such a system. A poor, unemployed, working-class man who unequivocally supports such a system, mainly only does so as a voter and as a influencer within his friendship networks and rarely stands to actually gain from what the establishment sell him — in fact, as we know, it’s usually the exact opposite.
With this loose definition in mind, we only need take a look at those who campaigned most prominently to leave the EU last year to get a rough idea about whether a Leave vote in the referendum is an anti-establishment vote. As we will see, the prominent Leave campaigners undoubtedly and firmly belong to the establishment.
And, by the way, this isn’t just a hunch. We know this from the evidence of what they’ve done, what they’ve said and who they are.
Michael Gove
As former Education Secretary, he oversaw the stealth privatisation of schools on an unprecedented scale, handing over public assets to what could, in some cases, be described as pseudo-charities. The boards of trustees, chairman, CEOs and Directors often own, hold shares in, or are employed by other companies that frequently find themselves awarded contracts for work by the academies/trusts, often without a tender process.
Significantly, the academisation has served as another way of giving public land to private developers. Although the education secretary has to approve any playing field sales, evidence shows that academies have a disproportionately higher playing field sale approval rate compared to schools owned and administered by the local authority. In my view, it’s far more likely that academy trust members (as oppose to ordinary school board members and the local authority) stand to gain personally from the selling of school fields for private development due to links they have to property developers and contractors.
Gove’s academisation of education has also led to the increased use of agency and non-permanent contracted workers who usually get paid less and have less rights. We also have seen a link to academy and free school staff being placed on zero hours contracts and recruiting for teachers who are not even qualified to teach. This is not just about cutting red tape. It’s about removing local and national accountability through stealth privatisation and shrinking the state.
We know that all of this is happening while academy trusts pay their CEOs and directors vast wages (which all comes from the public purse). We also know that academies offer significantly less legal rights to parents and pupils.
Much of the academisation of schools has attempted to be justified on debatable premise of an overall increase in educational performance, but improvement in performance can be and has been achieved without academisation. Many academies have suffered failing or poor results in school inspections.
Significantly, the academisation process increasingly removes the schools from local accountability, allowing a handover of services, money, public land and assets to the establishment at the expense of the public. It’s a transfer of wealth from the many to the few. That is the establishment at work and it was all under the watch and policies of prominent Brexiteer Michael Gove.
We also know that Michael Gove planned to remove major climate change teaching points from the curriculum. As those of us paying attention will know, the establishment will be the least affected by climate change and stand to gain the most in the short-term from a system which puts most animal species in jeopardy.
We know he frequently advocates for military intervention on foreign soils (otherwise euphemistically argued as spreading democracy) and is a signatory to the Henry Jackson Society.
We also know he has been backed by private individuals to very large sums, including over £30,000 in just one month in 2011, with donations coming from a mining company chief executive, a private money management firm and a “millionaire property tycoon”. We also know that Gove received vastly more political donations between May 2010 and October 2011 than any other MP in the country.
We also know Gove and his constituency office received donations from Tullow Oil or Aidan Heavey (the Chief Executive of Tullow Oil) of “£75,000 to Gove’s Surrey Heath constituency office (between 2010 and 2015)” and over £100,000 overall.
Now, it’s almost impossible to say what the direct consequence of these donations are but it would be naïve to think that those donating would not be expecting some favourable treatment. And we know that even as much as accepting a meal from one pharmaceutical company is significantly more likely to result in a doctor prescribing medicine manufactured by that company.
We know that Gove continues to rack up significant payments, donations, gifts, benefits and hospitality, by a range of businesses and individuals and organisations. This now includes a yearly salary for his on going work as a weekly columnist (of 8 hours work per week) for The Times, which pays him £150,000 a year, vastly more than his wage as an MP. We know that his background and current work for Murdock owned newspapers suggests a serious conflict of interest in which he may be more likely to priorities the interests of News Corp as well as many other corporations interlinked and aligned to them.
We know that support for Israel and his dalliance and friendships with so many global warming skeptics would likely be of benefit to Murdock who part owns Genie Energy, a company subsidiary of which intends to drill for shale oil in Israeli occupied parts of Syria. This seems to also align with his newspapers’ overall support for military intervention and regime change in the Middle East and consistently strong support for the Israeli state. Gove’s avid support of Israel including support and avocation of Zionism and equating the BDS movement — a movement concerning individual choice and local democratic choices — as “a crime worse than apartheid” (during an all-expenses trip funded by The Algemeiner and the Henry Jackson Society) and as anti-Semitic, seem to chime well with such establishment interests.
We also know that Gove was co-author of a 2005 book advocating for the NHS being denationalised (for clarity, this means privatised, opening the NHS to concepts of treatment around profitability).
We also know that Gove voted twice to sell-off England’s Forests in 2011, supports fracking and has regularly voted against measures to prevent climate change.
Boris Johnson
We know that Eton educated, former Bullingdon club member, Boris Johnson, when Mayor of London, abused his powers, showing two fingers to local democracy, by forcing schemes likely to be refused planning permission through the Greater London Authority’s planning team, frequently granting private developments at the expense of viable numbers of social and affordable housing.
He also handed outs dubious big contracts in highly contentious circumstances to ‘friends. (As an aside to this, he even had the temerity to argue about non-accountable, non-democratic commissioners during the Brexit campaign).
We know that he welcomed foreign investments into housing purchases of housing in London that have perpetuated the housing crisis, and, he did so without pushing for any changes in laws to limit the possibilities of foreign purchases of homes if no plans to live there or plans to keep empty (or if purchased by a company in a registered tax haven).
We know, as the Guardian reported in 2009, “more than half of the money donated to his mayoral campaign came from the financial sector”. We know that throughout his tenure, he staunchly defended bankers’ bonuses whilst fighting tooth and nail against any efforts to increase meaningful regulation of the industries.
We also know that a significant financier of Johnson’s mayoral compaign was appointed to an influential City Hall board.
We know that Boris Johnson kept a second job writing a monthly Telegraph columnist for which he receives over £20,000 (for 10 hours work) a month. We know he described the annual figure of over £250,000 in 2009 as “chicken feed”. We know that he wrote columns about Brexit during the referendum campaign, arguably a serious conflict of interests but nevertheless a platform to espouse establishment views and perhaps to also be dictated by them.
We know that Johnson is a supporter of fracking; that he’s against divestment from fossil fuels and that he’s a climate change sceptic.
We know from his MP register of interests that he received £50,000 personal donation towards staffing costs from Fitri Hay, the Co-owner and Director of JMH Group — a property development and investment firm and Chairman of Fosroc, a firm specialising in chemicals for the construction industry .
We also know only a year before this, he received a private donation from Fitri’s husband, Dr James Hay, Chairman of JMH who started his career at BP working his way to becoming a senior executive before starting JMH in 2002.
We know in 2015 that Johnson said that the social chapter of the EU should be scrapped, almost certainly meaning fewer workers rights and an even more overt race to the bottom economy.
We know he received private donation of £25k from a hedge fund manager and fox-hunting aficionado, Johan Chistofferson, who belongs to a company that was accused in a Channel 4 Dispatches programme of 2008 of exacerbating the financial crisis and gained significantly from “plunging bank shares”.
We also know that he received over £60k from Hedge Fund managers in 2015, and as, Thomas Pride pointed out last year that Hedge Funds stand to gain considerably from the UK leaving the EU.
Iain Duncan Smith
What do we know about Iain Duncan Smith, married to Betsy Duncan Smith, daughter of Lord Cottlesloe? Well, we know that he was also a key Leave campaigner.
We also know that when that while he was Work and Pensions Secretary, his scheme of mandatory unpaid labour was found by the High Court and the Court of Appeal to be illegal. We know that this amounted to free labour for corporations that could easily afford to pay staff. We know that the scheme went through without parliamentary scrutiny.
What else do we know? We know his proposals around universal credit would actually discentivise part-time workers from going full-time because it would actually make them worse off.
We know that his fit to work assessments cost more to administer than they save and the contracts for carrying them out were handed to private companies. We also know that there is a very high percentage rate of successful appeals to those being deemed fit for work, and we know that the scheme discriminated against people with severe mental health conditions. We also know that thousands have died shortly after having been declared fit for work.
We know that he inherited a policy of benefit sanctions, but, under his watch, ramped up the level and frequency of them. We know that he tried to justify them through groundless statistical claims and we know that their fairness and efficacy were frequently questioned by experts and MPs. We also now know, which was fairly easy to predict, that they don’t work.
We know that Iain Duncan Smith’s welfare reforms often actually did more for keeping people in poverty than it did for getting them out of it. We know that his welfare reforms have done very little, if anything, to encourage social mobility. In the meanwhile, it’s all been a nice way of handing money over inefficiently to private enterprises to do the work that the government or a government agency could do better.
We know that Iain Duncan Smith blames housing shortages on immigration, attempting to disguise the absolute governmental failures, starting with Thatcher (and continuing into New Labour and the Tories’ today going backwards if anything), of building truly affordable and social housing.
We also know that Iain Duncan Smith’s voting record suggests someone generally voting against actions to curb or limit climate change; someone who consistently votes for cuts to local government; someone who almost always votes for lower corporation tax; someone who nearly always votes against higher tax rates on highest earners.
We also know that Iain Duncan Smith would likely to stand to gain from increased privatisation of the NHS through holding shares and non-executive director position in the hygiene technology company Byotrol.
Priti Patel
Let’s look at Priti Patel. She’s probably most famous for her support of the death penalty. But she’s also well known for being a mouth-piece for the tobacco industry in her former role as a lobbyist for Weber Shandwich, a company that also does PR for big healthcare and big pharma, but that came after a stint working in the Conservative press office, likely giving her significant access to important figures in order to assist her company’s client, British American Tobacco (at a pay rate of £165 an hour).
Her background appears to be euphemistically described as corporate relations but this is arguably doing what’s best for corporations but not necessarily society.
Her voting record says a lot.
She notably voted for the smoking ban to be overturned in October 2010 and in December 2010 she signed a letter requesting that the laws around plain packaging on cigarettes be reconsidered.
In the Leave campaign, she actively argued for Brexit on the basis of that the UK would not then have to adhere to EU Provisions on workers’ rights, and she has been a significant backer of austerity measures and reduction of the welfare state.
She was also coauthor of the book Brittania Unchained where she, with her fellow co-writers, accused British workers of being the ‘worst idlers’ and argued for more market deregulation, cuts in tax, cuts in spending, reduction of the state, and restrictions in employment rights.
I’m not going to go through any more of the prominent campaigners in detail because I think most folk reading this will get the picture already (and this essay is already very long!). However, you can feel free to examine more of them in your own leisure if you want. If you’re minded to do that, I’d suggest taking a look at Chris Grayling (privatised probation, huge cuts to legal aid — removing many people’s access to justice) next and then working your way through.
Instead, I will continue to examine a significant aspect of Leave logic — that is the veracity of the claim that a Brexit vote was anti-establishment — by taking a brief look at the newspapers’ positions, ownership and their circulation.
2. Newspapers were mainly telling you to vote Leave. If you didn’t want to do what they said, why didn’t you vote Remain?
The papers with the highest circulation were avowedly pro-Brexit in editorials and in overall coverage. The owners of these papers are very much part of the establishment. If people were really looking to vote on an anti-establishment basis, why didn’t they protest against what they were being told to do by the most circulated newspapers and vote for remain?
Here’s a quick look at some papers.
The Sun — 1.7 million daily circulation
Owner: News Corp (Rupert Murdock)
Note: Highest circulation of any paper. Murdock holds non-dom status. Company owned through tax havens to avoid tax. EU has record of blocking monopolies not in public interest, this is quite annoying to Murdock who has fallen foul of them. He also has a record of climate change denialism. Newspapers coverage of global warming and climate change is appalling. Anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric/tone.
Daily Mail — 1.5million daily circulation
Owner: Jonathan Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere 5th (one clue to being establishment might well be in the title Lord)
Note: Second highest circulation of any paper. Lord Rothermere 5th holds non-dom status (I am speculating but I think it could be purely for tax avoidance purposes). Newspaper owned through various tax companies in Bermuda so as to avoid huge amounts in corporation tax. Actively promotes climate change denialism/doubt agenda. Frequently anti-immigrant in views.
Mail on Sunday — 1.3 million circulation
Owner: Jonathan Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere 5th (one clue to being establishment might well be in the title Lord)
Note: Third highest circulation (on a per issue basis). See Daily Mail.
Sunday Times — 790,000 circulation
Owner: Rupert Murdoch
Note: Fourth highest circulation of any paper (on a per issue basis). Non-dom status. Company owned through tax havens to avoid tax. Overall coverage more partisan to Brexit.
We also know The Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph backed Brexit. And we know that The Spectator backed Brexit. We know that the owners of these newspapers and magazine are The Barclays twins (for which folk can do their own research as to whether the twins might be considered part of the establishment).
We know that the Daily Express and Sunday Express backed Brexit. They inform us themselves that the average reader’s age of those newspapers is 59 and that 65% of readers are aged over 55. And we know that older people tend to vote more than younger people so they held a lot of clout.
We know that Richard Desmond treats employees appallingly and if he could get away with treating them worse, he would. We know he stopped paying into the press complaints commission because he doesn’t really care about any objective accountability.
But what we know about all of these newspapers is that they get large amounts in advertising from the finance industries and fossil fuel industries. And what we know about the finance industry and fossil fuel companies is that they donate to political parties in order to get favourable treatment. When you have newspaper models so reliant on advertisement revenues, it is highly likely that paying for adverts will garner favourable treatment in the press. We also know that some of the politicians have direct vested interests in finance and fossil fuel companies and we know there’s a neat revolving door policy for whenever they fancy a change in careers.
So when you really look at who the main Leave players are politically and within the media, it’s nigh-on impossible to see how voting in favour of Brexit can be justified as an anti-establishment vote.
Finally, this leads me to examine the ‘those that belittle my reasoning and decision are not respecting my democratic decision’ argument.
3. You have to be intellectually accountable for your decisions
There’s no entitlement to respect for a democratic decision. Respect should be given on the merits of that decision and how it is justified.
Suggesting that there is something inherently wrong with not respecting a person’s democratic decision is a copout attempt to avoid culpability or inquisition.
Respecting and accepting that someone has the right to have different political views and to vote differently to me is fine, but that does not (and should not) remove the right of others to question it, ridicule it or to point out the evidentially scarce nature of what they’re saying and/or basing their decision on. In fact, it’s one of the most important fundamental aspects of free speech that there is no entitlement to respect for what one thinks or does.
Take a quick example of racism. If someone said, “I hate black people”. They wouldn’t escape questioning or judgement on some relativist position of, “Well that’s just my view and everyone should respect that I have that view and stop trying to make me have their view.”
This is an unfortunately regular misunderstanding of what freedom of expression really means. We can respect that they can have a different view; that they’re entitled to think differently. But we shouldn’t automatically respect their view. Within reason, I respect all people’s autonomy to make bad decisions. But that doesn’t mean that I respect their actual decisions. This is a hugely important distinction.
I respect that someone has the right to vote a particular way, but any more respect a person might be entitled to is dependent on their actual decision and reasoning for it.
If someone makes a bad decision on bad reasoning then they should be accountable for that decision, and, importantly, it should at least be justified on the basis of decent evidence and critical reasoning. In the case of the Brexit vote, the election was swayed by a decision made without decent evidence and without any execution of critical thought.
I hope that that this might serve as future food for thought for all of us, because to think that voting leave constituted a vote against the establishment is frankly bizarre. It’s more like voting for the establishment on steroids.
If those who were considering voting Leave on what they considered at the time to be anti-establishment logic had bothered to look into the Leave proponents in any detail, it would have been patently clear that they should be highly sceptical and should perhaps re-evaluate their thinking and their planned decision. But all too many people did not bother.
It seems to me that there is a serious failing in our society that so many of us are broadly incapable of stopping and thinking critically before making key decisions.
I’m not trying to place the blame too firmly on those individuals that didn’t take the time out to think; I believe that they’ve been let down. I believe the outcome of the EU Referendum represents a wider failure of our education system and of journalism as a whole. We are not arming our citizens with sufficient skills for critical thinking, nor are we sufficiently reinforcing that learning through sound journalism.
As Professor Henry A Giroux puts it in his foreword to Portraits of Violence:
This is a culture of immediacy that devalues reason, dissent and critique and those institutions, such as public education and higher education, that support critical thinking, informed agency and collective struggles necessary for a democracy itself…
…Without a critical formative culture, and the public spheres that nourish it, a type of symbolic violence, engineered by the active disavowal of thought, emerges in which it becomes difficult for people to think critically and act with responsibility and informed judgment.”
A big question we should now be looking to address is: what can we do to avoid similar catastrophic failures in critical thinking from happening again?
