I read a thing by Iain MacWhirter today, but we often come from quite different places. In the middle of a very decent article about how more or less the entire Scottish intelligentsia is voting Yes (he's right about that), there was a weird wee clanger: he claims that nobody in Scotland is interested in immigration. For me this showed the kind of people MacWhirter has been hanging around with. In Scottish working class communities I have canvassed most people are worried about immigration – it is a hegemonic concern. Knocking doors, immigration is the most likely reason you will be given when someone takes issue with the Yes campaign, and it is also a reason some people give for wanting independence.
The UKIP surge in England is also about immigration – they use 'anti-EU' as code for opposing immigrants. Most people on the left avoid anti-EU politics for just this reason, and the likes of No2EU go out of their way to make it clear they oppose Eurocrats, not European immigrants. But this misses the point – UKIP voters aren't worried about Jose Barroso, and in some senses they're not really worried about immigration itself. Anti-immigration politics are actually code for yet another phenomenon.
It has been shown consistently that UKIP's voters are further to the left on most issues than supporters of the big three parties. They are more likely to favour nationalisation and protectionist measures. The Labour left in particular (bear in mind, in England there is such a thing) cannot fathom what is going on, and considers UKIP a sub-Tory phenomenon. That is of course true of their origins and true of many of their activists, but is now most definitely not true of their voting base. So why are they such extreme racists? The clue is in that last fact: their supporters HATE Westminster, HATE politics, and see it as delivering poverty and social decline. They FAVOUR greater social protection and national state ownership. They want controls on things that free market policies have seen the state cede control of - things like price controls, rent caps and so on. I know only too well that UKIP's economic politics are ultra-right, so don't get stuck here; I'm most definitely not claiming that the politics of UKIP are genuinely grassroots. But if by now the penny hasn't dropped on UKIP's support base consider this.
In normal times, the Governor of the Bank of England fixes the rate of unemployment, and the rate of wage increases. He (it's always a 'he') does this by a number of mechanisms, but interest rate targeting is a key one. Mark Carney is explicit about doing this if you are prepared to read beyond the illiterate froth of the non-financial papers. Sado-monetarism is nothing new, but at the moment the Governor is prepared to tolerate a rate of unemployment of 7%. The ruling class call this group of people knowingly consigned to the scrap head, the "Equilibrium Unemployment,” the rate of unemployment at which wages don't increase. Incidentally, their theories here are remarkably similar to what Marxists term the "Surplus Army of Labour."
What does this fixed rate of human misery mean, though?
Well, 7% is not the rate of adults without a job. It is the rate of adults considered to be active right now *in* the labour market, without a job. All those people who are sick, or full time carers or in receipt of disability benefits, or in full time education and so on: they are not in that 7%. We've got in the region of 9 million people chasing less than 500,000 jobs, most of which are created in London and SE England. That breaks down as just under 6.5 million 'underemployed' (people in crap part time jobs, or zero hours arrangements and so on) and around 2.5 million unemployed people chasing those 450,000 or so jobs inside the M25 orbital. That's why 1 in 3 households in Glasgow with a person of working age resident are classed as workless. Glasgow is not unique. There are many places in this "United” Kingdom which are black holes of permanent mass unemployment. Great swathes of despair pock mark these islands.
So New Labour... well actually, they made this problem worse. A lot worse. The last Labour government allowed 6.5 million immigrants into the UK: a little over a 10% increase in the population. Some returned to their country of origin when the shit hit the fan on the grand New Labour financial deregulation experiment, but many did not, hence the year on year growing population - the birth rate among UK born "white (some British nationality)" is less than 2 per couple. During the boom there were antagonisms over schools in England, over housing policy and so on. But it was actually refugees not Polish barristas and Latvian builders that caused most of the community 'beefs.' Those sentiments were most closely associated with the neighbours of these refugees and emerged out of the perceived injustice of differences in financing for social housing and refugee accommodation. Since the crash, that's changed. Now people are really having a pop at the skilled immigrant workers, even though they are paying British taxes and paying for British social welfare.
Why?
For a start, because social welfare is being ripped up. In fact the entire social contract is being revoked wholesale. Nary a day goes by when there isn't some sort of new attack on the concept of access to justice, access to education, access to healthcare, access to advancement, or access to the means of life itself. Imagine you're a full time mature student at a university in England. Or unemployed, with kids in college. Or pursuing a claim for wrongful dismissal.
Imagine it? Place yourself in your one bedroom flat in the East Midlands. You're fucked. Go home. Do not pass go. Do not collect £72 a week. These things can no longer be done. None of them, really, without incredible hardship. We are already *in* a crazed and inhuman market society thanks to New Labour, finished by the Tories. Only the Scottish Parliament is mitigating any of this insanity, and that is only lag, waiting for the whip hand of Westminster cuts to the Scottish budget to force the issue. Only a YES will get us out of this spiralling Hell. But most people do not, deep down, really believe that this is happening. Social democracy and the welfare state are so hegemonic that people believe they still exist despite the evidence of their destruction. They have to EXPERIENCE the death of these things to feel the difference. Politics can be like muscle memory in that sense.
Those of us familiar with scheme politics for instance, know all too well the battle cry of the frustrated social democrat: "Pull thae hooses doon mate. We want back and front doors." The reality that there will be no back and front door nirvana is invisible. The common assumption that the social contract is forever and indivisible is probably the biggest barrier to organising for change.
The popularity of UKIP's anti-immigration politics, while appalling, is not driven by an upsurge in racist hatred. There is not some mad ethnocentrict campaign of race hate aimed at 'the Polak, the Bulgar, the Magyar and the Slav' going on in the UK, despite the best efforts of men in bomber jackets with a clever social media strategy. But from the middle class discourse you get on immigration in the liberal media and in the YES campaign you would think that there is some escalating racial hatred going on, only held in check by occasional wafts of privileged liberal smugness.
The Labour elite supposes, in complete blindness to their decades long campaign of establishment racism, (whisper 'Islamic fundamentalism' again Tony?) that the shared demographic bias between Yes and UKIP – both find their greatest support in the working class – means that the Yes movement is a sort-of Scottish UKIP. It's not just them though: the Tory “Vote No Borders” astroturfing campaign assumed “unpolished voters” (their word) will be motivated to swing behind the UK if presented with Orangeish reaction and sneering at “politics.” Both views are a trap. But so is the smug.
Those concerned about immigration in Scotland will not vote UKIP. Angry Unionists pushed to the right by the referendum campaign will vote UKIP, because that's the British thing to do. That's it for UKIP in Scotland. Largely anti-immigration working class voters will continue to back the pro-immigration SNP and pro-immigration Yes prospectus. National political culture plays a role, but here's something for the middle class comfortable multiculturalists to chew on: anti-immigration sentiment is typically associated with people who have left wing views on social policy. I'll say that again. Anti-immigration sentiment is typically associated with people who have left wing views on social policy.
So enough preamble, what's the bloody point?
FULL EMPLOYMENT.
FULL EMPLOYMENT.
FULL EMPLOYMENT.
But when it's the main issue on the doorstep, and coming up again and again and again and again and again among people who are really very favourable to independence, and really very favourable to a thing they term "socialism," there is something else going on. If a community is hit with 50% unemployment (many Glasgow communities match this sort of profile), concern about labour market competition is bound to be hegemonic. This is especially true when even those at death's door are being hounded by ATOS out of their death beds to die on a zero hours contract.
In England anti-EU is code for anti-immigration, which is code for closed borders and full employment. This is why Labour cannot win the next election in England. They do not support a "referendum", which means they do not support a slow down in immigration, which means in the eyes of the voter they do not support jobs for working class people. In Scotland the situation is more complicated, but there is the same overwhelming desire in working class communities for full employment. It is so utterly hegemonic as a concern that the first person to promise and deliver on it will win it all. Nevermind the EU, nevermind immigration. These things are ABOUT something else.
Eating at hip new restaurants and being able to buy every food on God's earth might be very jolly for the middle classes who are 'pro-immigration.' But these same people live in a Scotland of largely all white Scottish commuter belt suburbs and towns which enjoy full employment and family wages. There is a profound disconnect in this country between the haves and the have nots. The baby boomers that bought their council houses and spawned bungalows and 2.4 cars Scotland do not face the same pressures that many working class communities do. This is why reindustrialisation is so important. A finance-based economy can never ever hope to deliver full employment.
We need to stop treating anti-immigration sentiment as being caused by individual racism, and the moral failings of the poor. It just comes across as patronising smugness. At root, it is a bunch of all "white Scottish" middle class orientalists hectoring working class people who actually already live in multicultural communities, as opposed to just going out to fruity restaurants. There is not some mad Enoch Powellist revival going on in England, and we are not immune to the same collectivist protectionist impulses enervating the UKIP rise in England, because the exact same pressures are placing intolerable strain on working class families, many of whom are struggling to eat. So let's get real, and let's start demanding full employment through reindustrialisation.
