David Cameron may soon be unemployed but, as the fallout of Britain’s EU exit begins, we can be assured it will not be the Eton class who will feel the burden.
Last month, tax and spending thinktank the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned that leaving the European Union would force ministers to extend austerity measures by up to two years. It was clear: exit the EU now and by 2020, the impact of lower GDP growth and extra borrowing costs would make a £20bn-£40bn chasm in the public purse. This morning we were told the pound had immediately plummeted to a 31-year low amid the prospects of recession. In the first few minutes of trading, the FTSE 100 took its biggest fall since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. This can no longer be downplayed as fear. It is fact. As my colleague Owen Jones wrote: “Economic turmoil beckons: the debate is how significant and protracted it will be.”
If the past six years has taught us anything, to a Conservative government national economic turmoil is best fixed off the back of personal turmoil: namely the gutting of public services and social security relied on by anyone struggling with sickness, unemployment and long-term poverty. The referendum results showing that large chunks of economically deprived communities voted to leave the EU is evidence of a dark irony emerging: the people likely to suffer the most from Brexit are the very people who were promised they would gain the most from it.
Over recent weeks, we have seen a referendum campaign in which parts of the Tory party – the politicians that have orchestrated seismic cuts to public services – have shifted the blame on to immigration and incompetent fiscal choices. Turkey was coming to flood the borders. Money was bleeding to faceless, fat cat EU controllers. That the Brexit headquarters chose to adorn campaign buses with the claim that £350m is sent to the EU each week right next to the familiar blue and white of the NHS symbol was a telling juxtaposition. This was not only about a rejection of the facts but it was also a complete distortion of them. It’s not because of NHS restructuring or cuts that you can’t get a GP appointment, but because money is being wasted on EU membership. It isn’t poor housing policy that means you’re stuck on the social housing list or can’t find an affordable home but it’s because immigrants are stealing them. In this fantasy Boris Johnson and Iain Duncan Smith are the friends of the voters struggling on low incomes and benefits.
It is always distasteful to watch power exploit marginalised people’s fears and needs. It is outright galling when the power in question helped cause the problems in the first place. Successive governments – not simply this one – have engrained deep-rooted inequality and widespread alienation. The EU referendum result is, among a variety of complex factors, the culmination of a long-term abandonment by the political class of large swaths of the population it’s designed to serve. But these problems have only been deepened by recent austerity – by policy choices that have stagnated living standards, withheld decent housing, stalled educational opportunities and led to unstable jobs and wages.
With the right of the Tory party emboldened by their victory, a new – more conservative – Tory administration is likely to be on its way. Now more than ever the left has a responsibility to reject the claim that, if the economy stumbles, further austerity is the answer. But more than that, we need to address the divisions, powerlessness and inequality that helped get us here. The lack of control many working-class voters feel does not truly stem from EU bureaucrats stealing sovereignty. From jobs to housing to education, each deserves real solutions. If we can achieve this, perhaps something good can rise from Brexit’s ashes.