Fred Weinberg wrote, the media’s basic message to Trump voters was: ‘You’re Uneducated and Deplorable’. Since most media people ‘never talk to real people’, they didn’t get the resentment felt by millions of Americans at ‘being told we live in “flyover country” … comprised of “uneducated” white males who do not understand that we need to be told how to live by “journalists” who live in the progressive bubble. Or by their elected friends.’42
Playing the new race card
The second widespread attempt to explain away the ‘disaster’ of the referendum result and the ‘tragedy’ of the US election has also focused on the shortcomings of the electorate. People who voted for Brexit and for Trump, we are blithely assured, must have been racists, xenophobes and Islamophobics. In which case their votes should be seen as morally illegitimate at least, if not legally suspect.
The pattern was set in the run-up to the EU referendum. Reports that some England football fans involved in trouble during the European Championships in France had been heard chanting ‘F*ck off Europe, we’re all voting Out!’ were seized upon as evidence that Leave supporters were basically an ignorant mob of hooligans, xenophobic and brutish, only a couple of pints away from launching a racist pogrom. The small-minded prejudices displayed like a football flag here were those of leading Remainers towards beer-drinking, football-watching working-class voters, who appear to them far more alien than suave Brussels bureaucrats.
A week before the referendum, pro-Remain Labour MP Jo Cox was murdered in the street by an apparently mentally disturbed man with a collection of Nazi books and paraphernalia, shouting about ‘traitors’ and ‘Britain first’. The killer was quickly branded a ‘Brexit nutter’ and pointed to as proof of the hatred and bigotry allegedly endorsed by the Leave campaign. The violent crimes of one racist madman thus became twisted into evidence against millions of sane, non-violent voters.
Almost immediately after the referendum result, a new scare started over a reported spree of ‘hate crimes’ against immigrants in various parts of the UK.
The political elite seized upon the allegations of racism with relish, to try to prove that some bigoted voters really should be seen as less equal than others. ‘I’m afraid it has to be said that there has been a vote from white working class Labour supporters. They have voted in the face of the fact that they have probably never even seen a migrant and it’s the fault of politicians,’ said Tory MP Anna Soubry. Leading Remainer Soubry, who was then minister for small businesses (not small minds?), told the BBC that the Brexit campaign had ‘unleashed’ a latent wave of anti-immigrant racism.43
Labour shadow health secretary (soon to become shadow home secretary) Diane Abbott responded to these attacks on her party’s traditional white working-class voters – by not only agreeing with the critics but going further. Abbott told a ‘Brexit: Unite Against Racism and Hatred’ event at the Labour Party conference that Labour MPs should not even discuss the issue of immigration with Leave supporters. Such people would not be satisfied because ‘what they really want is to see less foreign-looking people on their streets’.44
This cross-party political consensus against the white working classes seemed unsure whether they had voted Leave because they saw too many immigrants on their streets, or in spite of having never seen any. But both Tory and Labour Remainers apparently agreed that the Brexit vote had been a demonstration of British racism and bigotry.
Does anybody seriously believe that 17.4 million UK voters backed Leave for racist motives? If not, how many million racists do they think there really were among Brexit voters? The only thing running wild here was not a racist mob but the dark imaginations of political elitists.
The belief that voting to Remain was an anti-racist decision while Leavers must have been anti-immigrant reveals more about the one-eyed view of the anti-Brexit lobby. What do they imagine is so staunchly pro-migrant about the EU? If the European Union is such an open-borders institution as its officials insist, why are so many migrants barred from entering it drowning in the Mediterranean Sea?
Immigration was an important factor for many Leave voters, though hardly the obsession it has been made out to be; a post-referendum ComRes poll found that 34 per cent said immigration was their main concern, with 53 per cent instead prioritising the ‘ability of Britain to make its own laws’.45 Most of those concerned about immigration, however, did not see the issue in the crudely racist, send-’em-back style of the 1970s. In August 2016 a think-tank poll found a remarkable 84 per cent of British voters wanted EU migrants living and working in the UK to be allowed to stay after Brexit – including 77 per cent of Leave voters.46
The truth is that Britain in 2016 was a far more tolerant and anti-racist society than at any time in its history. Problems of overt racist abuse and violence bear no comparison to the bad old days of the 1970s, when I grew up in a suburban Surrey where racism was not so much acceptable as obligatory, and the 1980s, when some of us on the Left in politics organised to help defend immigrant families under threat of being burned out of London housing estates.
Despite all the warnings of racism on the rise, every serious survey of attitudes to race and ethnicity in British society tells the same story of growing tolerance today. One article published in October 2016 summarised various findings: only one in ten Brits now ‘endorse nakedly racist views’; the proportion of the English public ‘most hostile to immigration’ for racist reasons has shrunk from 13 per cent to 7 per cent; while the World Values Survey now ‘rates Britain as one of the most racially tolerant countries in the world’. None of which prevented the Remainer newspaper in question publishing the article under a headline which declared, contrary to all its own evidence, that post-referendum ‘Britain is becoming mean and small-minded’.47
The political and media panic about an alleged wave of ‘hate crimes’ after the referendum appeared equally dubious. A small handful of serious attacks, which may or may not have had anything to do with the referendum result, were mixed in with reports of many other minor or questionable incidents to create the impression of a brewing pogrom, with some commentators even indulging in horror fantasies about ‘the rise of fascism across the country’.
In October 2016, the Home Office reported a ‘sharp increase’ in hate crime after the referendum; there had been 5,468 hate crimes in July that year, a shocking 41 per cent up on the figures for July 2015. What were these crimes? They were alleged incidents reported to the police, often through phone, email or social media hotlines. They had not been investigated, far less tried as crimes in a court of law.
Instead the police simply record everything they are told about as a hate crime, without any need to question or investigate at all. The Operational Guidance for police forces explains: ‘For recording purposes, the perception of the victim, or any other person, is the defining factor in determining whether an incident is a hate incident … The victim does not have to justify or provide evidence of their belief, and police officers or staff should not directly challenge this perception. Evidence of hostility is not required for an incident or crime to be recorded as a hate crime or hate incident.’48
So, unlike other crimes, if anybody at all says anything at all is a hate crime, the police must record it as one, no ‘evidence of hostility’ required or questions asked. What was that about ‘post-truth’ politics and the downplaying of ‘objective facts’? Indeed, given this subjective system, and the way that the police and the mayor of London made high-profile appeals to report any suspected hate crimes after the referendum, the wonder might be that the statistics for reported incidents showed an increase of only 41 per cent.
This looked like the twenty-first-century equivalent of the mugging panics of the 1980s. Then, every black inner-city youth had been looked at in fear as a potential mugger. Now every suburban white working-class youth was being viewed with similar