Culture

The Choice Between Labour and Leave in the U.K. General Election


On June 16, 2016—a week before the referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union—Jo Cox was murdered in her Yorkshire constituency of Batley and Spen. Cox was a much loved Labour Member of Parliament, though she had only been elected the previous year. An internationalist who had campaigned on behalf of Syrian refugees, she had enthusiastically supported the Remain campaign. She was also married, with two young children. Her killer, a member of the far-right named Thomas Mair, is reported to have shouted “Britain first” as he shot and stabbed her. Two days later, in court, Mair gave his name as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

Cox’s death was mourned across the country, but it was felt most keenly in Yorkshire. Cox not only represented Batley and Spen; she grew up in the area. The central town of Batley, which has handsome municipal buildings, a sleepy high street, and a massive supermarket, was once a prosperous textiles center, producing “shoddy” and “mungo” recycled wool. It still makes things—biscuits and beds—but the big industrial employers of its past are gone. A memorial service for Cox, held in London the day before the referendum vote, was beamed live to a large screen in Batley’s town square. Thousands attended the memorial, wearing the white rose of Yorkshire on their lapels. Brendan Cox, Jo’s husband, gave a speech in which he spoke about Cox’s world view, particularly as it related to Brexit. “She feared the consequences of Europe dividing again, hated the idea of building walls between us, and worried about the dynamics that that could unleash,” he said.

Brendan Cox’s appeal was heartrending, but it seemingly made no difference in Batley and Spen, which, in addition to its majority population of lower-and-middle-income white residents, has a large and long-established South Asian community and a significant number of Eastern Europeans. The constituency voted, sixty per cent to forty per cent, to leave the European Union. On the night of the referendum, I was in Batley to see how local people would respond to the murder of their M.P. —not just emotionally but politically. I sat in a pub and drank cheap beer with three middle-aged men who worked in white-collar professions and who, in the last general election, had voted for Labour, the Conservatives, and the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, respectively. All three had voted for Leave. When I asked them what had swayed their decision, they talked about a range of concerns—including the somewhat nebulous issue of “control”—but the one they returned to was immigration. They told me that the Pakistani and Indian immigrants in Batley didn’t integrate with the majority-white population, and that untrammelled immigration had changed “the feeling” in town. When I suggested that the European Union was unrelated to the second-or-third-generation Pakistani or Indian immigrants living nearby, they were unconcerned. “We just want our country back,” one of the men told me.

Three and a half years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, Britain still has not left the European Union. Two Prime Ministers have fallen because of Brexit. Campaigners on both sides of the debate have become more, not less, dogmatic. My colleague Sam Knight recently wrote that Brexit has become a “soul-grinding shit show”—an unimprovable description.

The general election, scheduled for December 12th, is in large part designed to find a way through the impasse. If Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party wins a majority in Parliament, he will be free to pursue his government’s preferred form of Brexit. The Labour Party, under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, wants to negotiate a new deal and hold a second referendum; the Liberal Democrats want to cancel Brexit entirely. The Scottish National Party might ally with Labour if it means that they are granted a second referendum on Scottish independence. The Brexit Party, led by Nigel Farage, is spoiling for a harder Brexit.

The election as seen in Batley and Spen is a particularly interesting microcosm of a larger contest. Between 1983 and 1997, the constituency voted Conservative by a narrow margin, but the Labour lead is now strong. In 2016, after Cox’s murder, a special election was held to fill her seat, in which most other parties agreed not to oppose Labour, out of respect. Cox was replaced as M.P. by her friend Tracy Brabin, a former soap actress and screenwriter who also grew up in the area. In the next election, in 2017, Brabin won by nearly nine thousand votes, out of an electorate of around eighty thousand. At the same time, Batley and Spen was, and is, strongly pro-Leave. As in other former industrial towns, many Leave voters are also traditional Labour supporters. The question for those people will be: Which matters more, their position on Brexit or their loyalty to the Labour Party?

Recently, a poll conducted by YouGov gave Labour a healthy majority in Batley and Spen. Robert Hayward, an election analyst and former Conservative M.P., told me that he shares this view and expects Batley to vote Labour. But Chris Hanretty, a professor in the politics department at Royal Holloway, University of London, told me that “the troubled political history of the seat may mean that it is difficult to draw lessons from performance in 2017, and a better starting point may be the 2015 election,” when UKIP won a big share of the vote. Hanretty told me that “the seat should be considered in the balance.”

On a dreich day at the end of November, I joined Brabin as she campaigned in Batley. Brabin, who has blond hair and a breezy disposition, wore silver Dr. Martens shoes, a red Labour rosette on her lapel, and a necklace bearing the words of a suffragist maxim: “Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere.” We met at a hospital in her constituency, not long after Corbyn had publicized a document that he claimed proved that the Conservatives wanted to “sell off” the National Health Service to the private American health-care market in a post-Brexit trade deal. On closer inspection, the document did not appear to prove this, and the media storm eventually petered out. But Brabin was eager, nonetheless, to make some headway on the issue. Labour’s support of the N.H.S. was a vital distinction, she felt, between her party and the Conservatives.

Before she began to knock on doors, Brabin told me about the challenges she faced. Some voters in the area, she said, had gone “doolally” over Brexit. People had torn up her leaflets in front of her—one Leave supporter had told her, in the thick Yorkshire accent of the area, “I ’ate ya, and even me dog ’ates ya.” But there was also a more sinister element. Brabin said that she doesn’t campaign after dark, partly because she feared for her safety. “Since 2017, I really feel like Pandora’s box has been opened,” Brabin told me. “You can say anything you like. There have been greater threats, particularly on social media.”

Brabin recognized that the Brexit-related logjam in Parliament has enraged many reasonable people. “I understand why people are cross, and why people are fed up,” she said. But, she added, there was more than Brexit at stake when people voted on December 12th. Her role, she felt, was to move the conversation beyond Europe. She wanted to highlight the work that Labour would do to improve job prospects, local schools, public health, and public transport—and also to lay the blame for corrosion of opportunities and services at the foot of the Conservative austerity program. Brabin was working hard. She spent every morning at the gates of a different school, campaigning on education, then canvassed on foot for the rest of the day; when darkness fell, around four o’clock, she manned a phone bank into the evening. She knew the result would be close and was frequently kept awake at night by the idea of losing Cox’s seat to the Conservatives. “I can’t let them win,” she told me.

Brabin’s broadening of the debate was tactical as much as it was ideological. On Europe, the Conservatives have had a clear, stark message: they promise to “get Brexit done,” even if the truth—that Brexit won’t be done any time soon—was more complicated. Corbyn, meanwhile, has vacillated on Brexit. His party’s position during this election—that it would negotiate another deal with the E.U. and offer it to the British people in another referendum, while Corbyn himself would stay neutral in that campaign—was too opaque and complex to reach many voters. In fact, the evening before I met Brabin, the BBC’s most formidable political interviewer, Andrew Neil, had brutalized Corbyn on this and many other issues in a prime-time inquisition. (“Why would the British people want a Prime Minister that doesn’t have a view on what really is the greatest peacetime issue that’s faced this country for seventy years?” Neil asked.) Brabin, who supports a second referendum, defended Corbyn to me, speaking of his vision of a “fairer society,” but also admitted that the Neil interview had been a car crash. “It wasn’t good,” she said.

We walked through a modest but well-kept residential area filled with traditional Labour voters, most of whom are of South Asian descent. Brabin is excellent on the doorstep. People want to talk to her. During her tour, many voters said that they had always voted Labour and would always do so. A twenty-five-year-old who worked in insurance told Brabin, bluntly, “The Conservatives are for the rich”—a message that Corbyn and his shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell, have stressed in this campaign. As we moved on, Brabin said, “I didn’t pay him to say that.”

Europe was an issue. A twenty-six-year-old bed salesman told Brabin, “I think Brexit is a mistake.” She reassured him that Labour would place the issue back “in the hands of the people” with another referendum.

“Well, I hope they do,” the man said, doubtfully.

Eventually, we found someone who voted Conservative—an eighty-three-year-old white woman named Olga. Brabin spoke with her for much longer than she did with any of her supporters. (Brabin explained later that she enjoys debating politics with her own mother, who reads the conservative Daily Mail and whose views diverge wildly from her own.) Olga told Brabin that, although she didn’t “care for Boris,” she found Corbyn repulsive. I asked her whether Brexit was a factor in her decision-making.

“Yes,” Olga said. “You vote out, you want to be out.”

Mark Brooks, the Conservative candidate for Batley, will scoop up the votes of many Olgas. He has been a Euroskeptic since at least 2001, when he first ran for Parliament. This is his third attempt to win a seat. Brooks is the working-class son of a van driver from Kent, with the floppy hair of an overgrown school boy and an affable, unpolished manner that belies his employment in public relations. We met in a pub next to Batley railway station. Brooks drank a Diet Coke. He had just taken a train several hours north, from his home south of London. “People here are fed up,” Brooks told me. “They’re fed up with the fact Brexit’s taking so long.” Then, without prompting, he laid his finger on the crucial problem for Labour in this Leave-voting seat. “She”—Brabin—“has done everything she can to frustrate the process.”

Brooks believes that he can appeal to the sixty per cent of Leave voters in the constituency on that issue alone. But he also thinks that many Remain voters simply want the problem to go away. “What’s happening here is different to the narrative you hear in London,” Brooks told me. “The Remainers accept the result and want to get it done.” These voters, he said, simply wished to return to a calmer political environment. He imagined that they might be swayed by his message that a Conservative majority will not only get Brexit done, but it will mean that there won’t be another election or referendum for five years. “People don’t want any more politics,” Brooks said, with a chuckle. “This is a vote to get politics off the table.”

Brooks argued that another topic cut through with traditional Labour voters: the prospect of Corbyn as Prime Minister. “There’s the issue about patriotism and believing in your country, and they believe that Corbyn doesn’t believe in our country,” Brooks said. This seemed like dangerous territory, particularly given the recent history in the area. Brooks told me that he was careful about his use of language. “I’m a straight-talking, working-class Conservative,” he said. “But I’m aware I’ve got to be careful. It’s got to be positive and non-divisive.”

We finished our drinks, and Brooks left to begin his campaigning. I drove out of Batley, with freezing rain lashing the windshield, struck by how strange and mean it was to hold a general election in the middle of December. The weather is likely to be awful. Many people simply won’t go to a polling station. A low turnout could generate a surprising result, although which way the result would go in such a scenario is anybody’s guess.

In Jo Cox’s maiden speech to Parliament, in 2015, which has become famous since her death, she spoke about how the people of her diverse constituency had “far more in common than that which divides us.” Cox also spoke about the need for more investment in the North of England—a worthy topic for debate that has since been drowned out by Brexit, as so many issues have. What is so moving, though, when you watch the speech, is Cox’s spirit of optimism and the warmth with which her words were received by the M.P.s on the benches beside her. Although a partisan and passionate Labour M.P., Cox said that she would happily work with members on the other side of the House who were “genuinely committed” to projects she cared about. Politics in Britain has never been decorous, and it was far from gentle in 2015. But, looking back from the end of 2019, more than four torrid years later, it seems like her speech took place in a different epoch. In many ways, it did.



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