Given the north-east of England’s reputation as Brexit Central, you’d expect the upcoming EU elections to be particularly fraught round here. Normally EU elections are almost invisible affairs, but this one should be different, right? Brexit has set Westminster ablaze, constitutional crises loom, Nigel Farage has started another party. MEPs clearly matter now, don’t they?
That’s what Ukip thought, too. Party leader Gerard Batten rode his purple bus up Middlesbrough’s Linthorpe Road to kick off Ukip’s official EU election campaign. I saw that news and thought: “Wait, what happened? How didn’t I notice that?” Then I saw the photos – turns out I was hardly alone in not noticing. Nobody seems to have reported exact turnout numbers but the captions speak for themselves. “A Ukip supporter waves a placard. Another Ukip supporter wears a hat.” One photographer managed to get four people in the same frame, but if Ukip can’t muster enough of a crowd to fill a minibus here it’s worth asking why not.
You might say it’s because Ukip has been replaced by Farage’s new fundraising vehicle, the Brexit party, but it’s not as if the EU elections are all anyone can talk about up here. I haven’t had a single conversation with anyone about them, and I have, as you might expect, a social group that’s on the more political end of the spectrum. Just out of curiosity I’ve been asking people whether they could name any of the candidates standing for the European parliament in our region – nobody could.
It’s not that people aren’t political. We talked about the local elections, although – in common with most places – people are less interested in “sending a message to Westminster” than people in Westminster want us to be. London commentators poking through the entrails of the results to tell us what they mean for Brexit are falling, perhaps harder than normally, for the “here’s why this news event means my opinion is correct” fallacy. Did “Brexit” as an abstract concept matter? No doubt it did partially, but the independent who ousted Labour to take over the mayor’s office in Middlesbrough didn’t make Europe much of an issue in his campaign literature, although he did have “save our bus station” as a headline campaign feature.
The disparity is because of a peculiarity of British politics. People voted for Brexit but don’t even know who’s standing for MEP because, for several decades, the EU has functioned as a bogeyman, the angry God cursing the crops.
A cursory glance over the Euromyths site, overwhelmingly populated by the output of the British media, gives a look into how the myth of the EU functions. “EU to ban lollipop ladies’ sticks”, from way back in 1999, is typical. An entirely made-up story in which the EU was responsible for changing something (it wasn’t), with the underlying assumption that such change must be bad. Or how about the 2015 Telegraph report that the EU was “paying jobless migrants to take British jobs” – astute observers might observe the far-right tropes of “elites” polluting the purity of the nation in the undertones of these stories, which have been pushed by some newspapers for decades now. (As an aside, it is worth remembering that, despite the narrative that the north is exclusively populated by plain-spoken Farage fans in cloth caps, these newspapers are all published from the cosmopolitan centre of remain-voting London.)
Brexit was, and remains, largely about this mythical EU and its symbolic opposition to an equally mythical Britain, rather than about anything specific to the actual EU. Brexit is pure magic – standing in for your hopes or fears. Bring it down to the level of the prosaic, to MEPs and trade policy, and it loses this magic and becomes ugly and undesirable. Ultimately Brexit cannot be fulfilled, it can only be betrayed.
Leave and remain groups talk past each other on Labour’s real or imagined failures. Is Labour losing leave votes because of a sense the party is betraying the spirit of the Brexit vote? Seems likely. Is it losing remain votes because it isn’t committed to revoking article 50 and keeping us in the EU? Probably. Get a policy out of that.
Beyond electoralism, the Brexit reasoning doesn’t get much clearer for anyone on the left. The pro-Brexit left, such as the economist Grace Blakely, argue a convincing case that the economic populism of a Corbynite Labour would be opposed by the EU as currently instituted and that the deep reforms that attracted people to the newly socialist Labour could be stymied if the UK remains a member. Gina Miller, who took the government to court over Brexit, said she was “more worried about a certain Mr Corbyn” than she was about Brexit – a position seemingly shared by many in the EU. Others argue, no less convincingly, that Brexit is and remains a project of the far right and that it is a pipe dream to assume the left can force this authoritarian locomotive on to new humanitarian, internationalist rails at this stage. We should be aiming to remain and reform, they say. Which is fair enough, but if we cannot reform Brexit in our own country, how can we be expected to reform the EU either? It is not that either of these positions is wrong, more that they are both correct, which unfortunately does not provide a nice answer for anyone.
It’s easy to say it’s obvious what should happen next. The data is full of so much noise that you can extract any signal you want. The danger is that, with so little that is real to grasp on to, and with people desperate to map the vague hopes and fears of a divided nation on to a particular position regarding the common market, the EU parliamentary elections will provide many more tea leaves but no more clarity.
• Phil McDuff writes on economics and social policy
