Class and Immigration - an interview with a Leave voter.

Kay Harris lives in Betws, a small ex-mining community in the South Wales valleys. Unemployment in Betws is way above the national average and if you’re between the ages of 16-24, there’s a 1 in 5 chance that you won’t have a job. In the housing estate where she lives, several of Kay’s neighbours are struggling to get by. Every year, Kay puts on a coach for local children to go to a theme park like Alton Towers or Drayton Manor so they have something to do in the school holidays. Now, she tells me, parents are finding it hard to find the money to send their children on the bus. Thanks to things like bedroom tax and welfare cuts, life isn’t getting an easier.

It wasn’t always like this. St John’s colliery in nearby Maesteg used to employ upwards of 700 workers, as did several other nearby pits. Back then, before they were closed by Margaret Thatcher, coal mines provided large-scale employment in Betws and beyond. It seems that most people worked down the mines. For Kay’s late father however, employment didn’t come from coal. He worked as a secretary for the longstanding local Labour MP, Ray Powell, one of the ‘old Labour’ generation.

When I spoke to Kay last year, she was proud of this piece of family history but not to the extent that it guaranteed any particular loyalty to the Labour party. Infact, she didn’t have any loyalty to any political party, only a few local politicians who were willing to help her in her campaign against the bedroom tax.

Kay’s house is managed by the local housing association, Valley’s to Coast. In 2013, following government legislation, Kay was told she would have to start paying the ‘under occupancy penalty’, or bedroom tax as it’s more commonly known. This was because she was deemed to have a spare room in her small three-bedroom house that she didn’t need. This of course was wrong in itself, she very much does need it.

Kay lives with her husband Terrance (pictured above) and her son Gareth who’s in his twenties. The small box room that was deemed unnecessary is occupied by Terrance most nights as he is severely ill. On weekends, Kay’s two grandchildren, Damien and Maisy, use it when they come for a sleepover. When I met them in 2015, the bedroom tax was costing Kay’s family £127 a month. This was to be taken out of a total monthly budget of just £600. Kay could barely find the money to buy groceries, let alone anything else. ‘I can’t even afford a haircut!’ she told me.

Kay started to organise her estate against the bedroom tax by holding meetings in her living room and helping people challenge it in the courts. She is still fighting the bedroom tax, and still retains little faith in the majority of politicians.

Betws, and many places like it, were hit hard by Thatcher’s war on miners. As Kay told me last year:

‘The mines closing had a heck of a lot of an effect on an area like this. It disrupted everywhere, because as I said I wouldn’t have minded working down the pits. A job is a job at the end of the day. But it affected everywhere. Not just mining villages but everywhere. The Conservatives have got a heck of a lot to answer for. Heck of a lot. Because they’ve ruined this country.’

Since the 1980s, successive governments have made the situation progressively worse, with the post-2010 austerity administration causing particular damage.

When I spoke to Kay two days before the EU referendum, she told me that she was voting Leave. She told me that almost everyone she knew was voting Leave as well. Kay’s estate is very close-knit and from what she told me, it seemed that the consensus in Betws had formed in favour Brexit.

When I asked her why she was voting Leave, there were a number of reasons she gave that I think are worth discussing.

I highlight Kay Harris as an example of a Leave voter is not because she is some kind of oracle who speaks for all working class Leave voters, but because her circumstances are typical of a certain type of Leave voter, and it’s important to get behind the data. The Ashcroft poll that was released shortly after the referendum is one of the more detailed studies of the Leave vote. It showed that a majority of people in their sixties, who are unemployed, fall into the poorest social groups and who live in council or housing association run accommodation voted Leave. Kay fits into all of these categories.

The first reason she gave as to why she was voting leave was to do with the amount of money that goes to the European Union each year. She said the money could better be spent on things in Britain, specifically on the Bedroom Tax. Kay didn’t have much faith in this being delivered, but it was a point of principle. Mixed in with this was the sense that the EU wasn’t really necessary: ‘Well, what’s the worth of it?’ she said.

The second reason Kay gave for voting Leave was immigration. ‘To stop all these foreigners taking the jobs that our young people could be doing.’ when I challenged her on this, saying that surely it was because mines and factories had closed that had led to the lack of jobs, not immigrants, she agreed: ‘As I’ve told you before’ she said ‘Thatcher ruined this country’. This didn’t make Kay row back on her initial point however.

When I spoke to Kay in 2015, immigration came up only once and this time also in the context of jobs. But back then, the main point kay wanted to get across about employment was not around immigration:

‘All the jobs that are out there now you need qualifications for. Well, some people haven’t got the qualifications. It is hard, but especially for the youngsters. It is hard for them. Like they go to college and what’s it worth because there’s no jobs when they come out?’

In a few long conversations, immigration has come up, but only ever in the context of jobs, and was nowhere near the level of importance given to the Bedroom Tax or the general feeling of betrayal by the political class. This can be seen in Kay’s support for Jeremy Corbyn. Immediately after the referendum, she had no time for the Labour leader. However, after being exposed to Corbyn’s strong opposition to austerity and welfare cuts during his re-election campaign, she changed her mind. Kay is aware of Corbyn’s position on immigration and how it differs to her own, but it didn’t stop her backing him over Owen Smith. This is despite the fact that Smith made a cynical play for people like Kay when he said that immigrants were taking school places in South Wales. Kay saw through this, and told me that there was something about Smith that she didn’t trust.

None of this is to make excuses for comments about ‘foreigners’ taking jobs, and certainly the issue of immigration became hardened around the EU. However, it is saying that immigration is not the key motivating political factor that drives everything else for Kay.

Instead, and in the context of a barrage of anti-migrant discourse, immigration has become a way to present explanations and solutions to real problems in life such as unemployment or lack of housing.

I believe that this is partly why Kay does not support UKIP, something she shares with so many like her who cited immigration as a major factor in the referendum, but who haven’t made the leap into supporting the far right party. UKIP deliberately made immigration their main issue but failed to connect even with the people who appear to hold similar views about the subject. Part of this is maybe because like Kay, a lot of those people are not actually affected by immigration in a negative way but rather are impacted by continuing attacks on housing, welfare, wages and services; areas that UKIP has fairly little to say about.

With this in mind, the basis of a party built primarily around anti-immigration racism is not as solid as we might think. This has resulted in the unexpected situation where Leave triumphed but support for UKIP dropped, and the party has now been thrown into a major crisis.

In such a period of flux as we are in, this situation could change if UKIP (or another far right party) can successfully tap into anger over social issues. It is hard to see where that force is going to come from in the immediate future, although the billionaire UKIP funder Aaron Banks is reportedly discussing such a thing. Certainly Theresa May has tried to articulate people’s anger and sought to turn it onto migrants, but people like Kay will have difficulty in finding an ally in a Tory party who have destroyed so many things in her life, both historically and in the here and now.

It is important to understand the opposition to immigration amongst sections of the working class as operating at different levels if we are to successfully challenge it. With UKIP facing huge problems and Corbyn offering a much different solution to the crisis facing many people, it gives us the opportunity to take on anti-immigration views without making concessions, but also without being afraid of such views to the point where we simply condemn or ridicule people.

Instead, we have to challenge it from a point on commonality and solidarity with the daily struggles people face. This brings us onto the last reason Kay gave for voting Leave: the feeling that something had to change and that Brexit was a way of delivering that.

This is part of the reason why repeated threats about staying in the EU from a broad array of ruling class voices, from Barack Obama to the IMF and Tony Blair and David Cameron, didn’t cut through. There was a sense that things can’t get much worse, and those people who were saying that the EU was a net benefit to Kay and her family generally had no idea what life was actually like for them, or had actually been an active part in making things worse (Major, Blair, Brown, Osborne and Cameron for example).

Again, when I spoke to Kay last year, this is what she told me about her general lack of faith in politicians.

‘I don’t trust Labour, I don’t trust any party. My mother’s neighbour said you want to leave Labour because it’s coming into New Labour and go to UKIP. I said I’m not even voting for UKIP, I’m not voting for any of them. What’s the worth? They’re not listening!’

Yes, the area where Kay lives is, in one way, a beneficiary of EU funding in the sense that the EU funds certain things in the South Wales valleys. But unsurprisingly, this means little to people in housing estates like the one in Betws. Kay once told me that one of her neighbours, another housing association tenant, had to fight like hell just to get a wheelchair ramp to his front door. Kay’s house is in desperate need of some basic repairs that the housing association never get around to doing.

In this context, when even just buying groceries or getting transport is a struggle, and where there is zero room for unexpected costs, telling someone that they’re doing well out of the EU because there’s a new road or a heritage centre somewhere is to completely fail to understand the situation that they’re in and the dynamics involved. But that is the message that came from a Prime Minister whose government were directly responsible for impoverishing people’s lives. It is not hard to see how someone can respond to such a figure with something along the lines of ‘Fuck you, how dare you tell me what’s good for me!’

This is what scores of people, from places like Betws, said when they went to their polling station on 23rd June. The anger was not directed at the EU in a clear way, it was riddled with contradictions. Nevertheless, an unmistakable part of it was an expression of discontent.

It was a discontent with a political system that has failed people like Kay for over 30 years and shows no sign of stopping. Is it any wonder that the ‘status quo’ argument failed when for so many it offered nothing but guaranteed misery? When people in Betws lined up to Leave, they were rejecting a message handed down by the most senior guardians of neo-liberalism which said, in effect, that things always had to be this way. Years of decline for them, coupled with very visible and extraordinary wealth for a few others, showed a different reality to the one offered by all the experts.

It is this strength of feeling that helped to deliver Brexit and which is now reshaping the political map of the future across the Western world. The toxic way that immigration played into the Brexit vote means that there is nothing automatically progressive about this expression of deep unhappiness. Instead, the battle of ideas has been blown wide open, and it is now down to us, the left and the labour movement, to grapple with this reality and try to determine its outcome. If we don't, Trump shows us a glimpse of what the consequences could be.

When I spoke to Kay after the vote, there was no sense of shock about what had just happened or a feeling of victory. ‘Yeah’ she said, ‘I’m happy. But they won’t change it though, nothing will happen. Mind you, it was funny seeing that Cameron resign’.