The left must seize the post-Brexit debate

The United Kingdom is in a state of shock. The country has voted to leave the European Union even though many people expected it to go the other way. Their Prime Minister has announced he will resign this fall. The pound has taken a beating in the currency markets, and may fall further. The leader of the Scottish National Party is beginning the preparations for a second independence referendum. And that’s just the start of several years of uncertainty that lie ahead before the United Kingdom officially leaves the European Union.

There’s a lot I could write about what a horrible decision this is, and it appears a number of regretful Leave voters recognize this to be the case, but instead I want to focus on what the left should do now that the British electorate has made this decision.

The sad reality that this referendum illustrates is how divided the United Kingdom has become. The old voted Leave while the young voted Remain. London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland voted to Remain, but nearly all of the rest of the England and Wales voted to Leave. Part of the anger and disillusionment that led so many people to desire a split from the European Union comes out of the utter destitution they face on a daily basis.

Britain’s economic growth is centred in London, and as a result many former industrial towns have been decimated. Their residents now struggle to get by. The good jobs are gone, and instead they have to survive on meagre salaries and zero-hour contracts, if they can find a job at all. Their standard of living has stagnated, if not fallen, and they want someone to blame. Unfortunately, they’ve directed their anger in the wrong direction.

The Brexit campaign has largely been dominated by the narratives of the right. On one side were the neoliberals represented by David Cameron’s side of the Conservative Party and New Labour. On the other was a nationalist xenophobia led by the Tory right-wing and the anti-immigrant UKIP. The left has been largely missing from the debate, outside the occasional supportive statement from socialist Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. It seems the nationalists have won, but now that the British people have voted for Brexit, the left must seek to dominate the debate moving forward.

A compassionate vision for the future

Thus far fear has been spread by seizing on messages of economic decline and the typical bigoted narratives about immigration, but the left has a unique opportunity to provide a hopeful vision for the future of the country, particularly because of their relative absence from the mainstream debate.

The primary concerns of Britons are economic and social. They can’t find good jobs, which means they can’t have a good standard of living. They’ve also seen the price of housing soar and the quality of their public services drop. Leave campaign propaganda blamed these issues on the European Union and immigration, respectively, but neither were the real problem. The left must focus on the same issues, but present new solutions.

Nationalists promise that once economic ties are reduced with the rest of the world, jobs will return, and once immigrants are ejected, there will be more for citizens. Both of these assertions ignore crucial facts. Any jobs that have been moved abroad will never return in the same quantities or with the same wages. These jobs are usually exported because they’re routine and are relatively low-skilled, which means they’re prime targets for automation.

That automation is already occurring in the countries where they’ve been outsourced, but a little slower because wages are lower. However, if the same work had to be done in a wealthier country where wages are higher, there would be a far greater incentive to automate. The same number of jobs would not return.

While immigration was a piece of the economic question, it was the main focus of social argument, namely that public services like healthcare and education are stressed and overcrowded because of the number of immigrants entering the country. However, immigrants actually contribute more to the tax base, and use fewer services than citizens. They’re a net benefit to the system. The real cause of the decline in service quality is the austerity imposed by David Cameron’s government, which slashed funding for services while cutting taxes for the wealthy. But they’re not the only culprit. Budget reductions focused on the welfare state have been common for many years, and it’s the cumulative effect of all of those cuts over the span of many governments that have created the service quality problems of the present. Not immigration.

Instead of accepting the arguments of the right, the left must present the realities of the challenges Britain is facing, and hopeful solutions that will make life better for everyone. Instead of focusing on creating more shitty jobs that people only work for the income because they need it to survive, a new economic approach must be taken. Everyone must be provided with a basic income to cover the necessities of life, and any earned wages could then be used for the things people desire.

Since the necessities would then be would be provided for, people wouldn’t need to work as many hours. Instead of having some people work 40 or 50 hours every week, the left must advocate for the reduction in working hours to provide more people with jobs of 15 to 20 hours per week. In order to further reduce working times, automation should then be incentivized to ensure the burden of unenjoyable work falls on robots instead of humans. This would allow people to spend more time enjoying their lives instead of having to work just to earn an income.

Paired with this new vision for the future of work must come a reinvestment in the welfare state. Health care must remain free at the point of access, waiting times must be reduced, and patient costs must be minimized or eliminated. Education must be expanded to reach as many people as possible, provide a variety of avenues to access education, eliminate fees for all levels of learning, and guarantee more autonomy to students in their educational paths.

There’s also a role for the government in the provision of housing, which has been severely curtailed in the past several decades. The housing of the masses has been left to the private market, but they’ve decided only to build luxury condos and suburban homes where it’s profitable. This has left a huge gap in the amount of affordable housing available, and it’s in that area where the government will always be needed to invest in social housing to ensure everyone has a place to live that doesn’t consume the bulk of their income.

Brexit may be devastating for many people, but the left must now look to the future.

Those who see the prospect of a better future have a duty to their neighbours, even those who voted Leave, to break the hold of the right on the mainstream debate and to add a new perspective to the mix. Instead of focusing on fear and doom, they must present a hopeful vision for the future that frees people from the income trap, and improves quality-of-life without requiring immigrants be targeted and ejected.

The Leave campaign has already begun backtracking on the guarantees they made to the British people about what would occur in the event of a Brexit. The masses are already sufficiently disillusioned with the elite, and before they give up altogether, the left must seize this opportunity to present them with a compassionate alternative to the ruthless destruction that neoliberalism has wrought, and nationalists seek to extend.