THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

Author:STEVE BUCKLEDEE
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

When the head and heart have a shared objective, and the owner of said organs is ‘passionately excited’ and motivated by the fire of 1940 that ‘still burns’, the reader might expect the road to renewed greatness to be a well-lit highway. Reading on, however, it turns out to be the familiar path of liberating British businesses from EU regulations.

As noted earlier in this work, the right-wing Daily Express, which in normal circumstances cannot find even the most grudging word of approval for anything the Labour Party does, was quite willing to let the Lexit voice be heard. Brendan Chilton (2016), leader of the Labour Leave campaign, seized the opportunity to make an impassioned appeal in The Express for a return to the values of a historical period the country can be proud of, not the Second World War, but the post-war Labour governments of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson that created the National Health Service and enacted enlightened legislation in such areas as workers’ rights, equal pay and race relations before Britain joined the EEC. In contrast the EU, which imposes austerity upon Greece, Portugal and Italy and conducts secret negotiations with the United States over the TTIP, is presented as a reactionary institution intent on reversing the hard-won reforms of the twentieth century. Where the top-down mindset of the Daily Mail urges senior Tories to replace Cameron with one of their own, Chilton’s bottom-up view of things leads him to use imagery of class struggle in correctly predicting Labour voters’ drift towards Leave and deploring the party hierarchy’s loss of contact with the base.

Up to 40 per cent of Labour voters are set to vote Leave on June 23 – and this figure will rise. It is extremely embarrassing to see senior Labour figures bowing to the EU as if it were a compassionate deity handing out rights to grateful serfs.

In doing so, these grandees are blindly ignoring the history of the British Labour and trade union movement and all that it has achieved for working people in the UK and abroad. It was Labour and trade union figures who won the rights for working people in this country – not the EU.

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