6 July 2016 — FAIR

Janine Jackson interviewed Joe Macaré about the Brexit vote for the July 1, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: The story of masses of Britons googling “What’s the EU?” seems to be apocryphal, unsurprisingly. But it is fair to say many people were shocked by referendum results calling for Britain to leave the European Union.

In the wake of the vote, some say many proponents of a so-called Brexit didn’t really expect it to happen. So how did it? And what is there to be learned from the echoes between the racism and nativism demonstrated and exploited by some Leave campaigners, and certain stokers of those same sentiments closer to home?

Joe Macaré is publisher at the nonprofit news organization Truthout. He co-edited the anthology Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States. He joins us now by phone from Chicago. Welcome to CounterSpin, Joe Macaré.

Joe Macaré: Thanks. Glad to be here.

JJ: In making sense of the results, many are starting with groups like UKIP and Britain First, the outwardly nativist and racist people represented, perhaps, by the person who killed Jo Cox. In your essay for Truthout, you don’t discount that influence at all, but it’s not where you start. What are some of the things you think we should think about as helping create the conditions, if you will, for the vote to leave?

JM: One place to start is that for at least 20 years, both of the dominant two parties in the UK, the Conservative Party and Labour—particularly in the New Labour iteration of that party, which came into being under Tony Blair and took power in 1997—those parties have been willing to make various degree of dog whistles or, increasingly over time, outright scaremongering rhetoric about immigration in an attempt to win votes. And according to those parties, it’s been to ensure that far-right parties — for a long time, that was the British National Party, now it’s more Britain First and UKIP; UKIP are a sort of respectable version, in some ways, of those far-right parties.

The mainstream parties have been very willing to use xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric, to one degree or another, to ensure that they win votes, and also as a way of redirecting resentment, as their economic policies have caused poverty and have created a huge amount of resentment amongst working people in the UK. They need to redirect that resentment to someone, and, as always, an obvious target is people who are new to the country.

And it’s a combination of the kind of Islamophobia we see in the US as well, but also often specifically xenophobia against economic immigrants from elsewhere in Europe. What’s happening is basically a kind of narrowing of the definition of whiteness again, to mean that, like, Polish people living in the UK are suddenly considered “other” and unacceptable. So I think that  you have to look at how those mainstream parties and the media have really done a huge amount of work in making the kind of racism demonstrated by those far-right parties acceptable.

JJ: Media play a big role in directing that gaze, don’t they? I mean, we certainly see that here. They, in some cases, straight up say, here’s who you should blame for the problems in your life.

JM: Right. I mean, a great example of this is the BBC, between a certain period, had Nigel Farage, who is the leader of the UKIP party, on as a guest of their flagship political discussion show, Question Time. They had him on more than any other figure, more than any other politician, I believe possibly more than any other guest. There’s obvious parallels to someone like Donald Trump, in the sense that the media play a huge role in legitimizing and giving a platform to and creating the fame of someone, and then retroactively claim, well, we have to cover this person, we have to give him a platform, because he’s popular.

JJ: Right.

JM: And, also, a lot of this media purports to be in some way left-leaning or liberal, and will then very regretfully say, well, this is terrible, but has in fact legitimized this. And you see it in the kind of op-eds that nominally left papers like the Guardian or nominally liberal papers like the Independent have been willing to publish, op-eds by people basically saying, well, you know, we need to have a conversation about Muslims living in the UK, or we need to have a conversation about the number of economic migrants. And what they’re basically doing is making forms of racism and xenophobia into a sort of legitimate voice in a debate.

JJ: Yes, there is definitely a special role for the contrarian putative leftist who says, you know, I know that we hate to say this, we liberals, but we really need to. I think of Bill Maher saying, you know, let’s just acknowledge that really Muslims are the problem. So it’s across spectrum in media, is what we’re saying.

And then we come to the EU itself, which has shown up in media stories. I’m seeing people say, well, we talk about sovereignty when we’re saying, we don’t want companies to use trade pacts to override our laws, you know? We do care about sovereignty. And maybe what the Brexit folks were talking about was just the EU as an undemocratic force. What do you make of that? There is something to be said about the role that the European Union has played and is playing.

JM: Right, absolutely. In my article, and I think in any analysis, you have to say that the EU bears a lot of responsibility, in that many of the things which could be said about it by people campaigning to leave were true, and many of the things that were said by some of those campaigning to remain were not true. The EU is not a kind of shining beacon of democracy and plurality. The problem is that’s not what the Leave campaigners were arguing for, and you see this really clearly in the aftermath of the vote, and it’s not what we’re going to see in terms of the economic consequences.

So it’s tempting to see Brexit as striking a blow against a European neo-liberal elite, and there’s a degree of truth in that. But, unfortunately, it’s a victory for the British right, and not just in cultural terms, but also in terms of economic policy. What they’re already saying is that this will have to result in more cuts, more tax raises on ordinary people. It’s not that the economic results in the UK are going to be anything other than austerity and neoliberalism.

JJ: Media are going to stay on this story. They can do it well or poorly. What would you like to see US media doing more of, less of, questions they might ask, folks they might talk to? What are some thoughts you have for media?

JM: Paying attention to what’s actually going on on the ground in the UK is a huge one. There’s been some people on the left who have wanted to see this as a sort of victory against neoliberal forces, against the global 0.01 Percent. I think to have that rosy view of it means completely ignoring people on the ground in the UK, who are saying this is terrible specifically because of the way in which it has emboldened racism within the UK, which was already there and was already on the rise. But it seems extremely likely, judging from the media reports from the UK, the social media discussions, that it has produced a certain increase in that already-rising level of racism.

Those voices, people within the UK, specifically people within the UK who themselves have experienced this emboldened racism and xenophobia, are some of the most important voices to listen to. And everyone else in the UK who’s directly affected by the economic and other policies of the government there, because those are the people who can tell you how the economic policies that get put in place now, are they in any way preferable to being part of the EU, the labor policies that have been put in place, in any way preferable? So I think those are the voices that US media need to keep paying attention to. And really now, because of things like social media, there’s no excuse not to be paying attention to those people.

JJ: Joe Macaré, thank you so much. Joe Macaré is publisher of Truthout, online at truth-out.org. That’s where you’ll find his piece, “Who Should We Blame for Brexit and Where Do We Go From Here?” Thank you for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

JM: Thanks for having me.

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