Trump and Brexit Are Quite Different Phenomena

One particularly welcome aspect of the House of Commons vote to pass the Bill to trigger the Article 50 process is the rebuff it represents to the relentless campaign, in some quarters, and in the Guardian in particular, to equate and conflate support for Brexit with support for Donald Trump.  Trump’s justified unpopularity – in Europe as a whole and in Britain in particular – has proved to be for some a welcome and ever-ready stick with which to beat Brexiteers.

It seems to be an article of faith for some that it is impossible to support Brexit without supporting Trump; this contention takes its place as part of a wider (and equally determined, if unsupported) charge that there can be no legitimate grounds for supporting Brexit.  A vote for Brexit, it is maintained, can be explained only as an expression of bigotry and ignorance – hence, it is argued, the unavoidable identification with Trump and his supporters.

The contention that no one could support Brexit without supporting Trump (a fiction of which I and many others are living refutations) can be maintained only by a resolute refusal to recognise the legitimacy of many of the rational objections that can be made to EU membership.

It also requires that no acknowledgment can be allowed of those voices, particularly from the left, who argue that the EU is not “Europe” but a particular economic arrangement – one which entrenches “free-market” precepts and operates against the interests of the UK and of the British working class in particular, as well as of working people across Europe.  The stubborn refusal to hear those voices means that those arguing for Brexit on rational and pro-Europe grounds have struggled to be heard – and the debate is all the poorer for that.

It is one thing to choose not to share the reservations that others hold; but to deny that they exist, or so thoroughly to misrepresent them, is to do no one any favours.  It leaves those who support EU membership bereft of any proper understanding of, and therefore too ready to dismiss, the real concerns of many of their fellow citizens; and it leaves unaddressed all those real concerns – about the UK’s perennial trade deficit, our manufacturing decline, the almost non-existent net productive investment, the unstoppable inflow of cheap labour from Eastern Europe, and above all the perceived sense of the loss of self-government and the weakening of our democracy – with the result that those who express such concerns, but are then ignored or dismissed, are left with an unappealing option.

If their legitimate and practical concerns are over-ridden – one might say “trumped” – by the “finer sensibilities” of those who lament the supposed breach with Europe (and its food, wine, music, literature and other cultural glories), where else have they to go, if their concerns are to be heard, but to a Trump or a Farage – and they are then excoriated all over again, de haut en bas, by their supposed betters.

It is to be hoped that the Commons vote, and the inevitability now of the Article 50 process and the consequent negotiation, will allow a shift of focus – away from constantly assessing, and campaigning for, the chances of somehow reversing the referendum result, and towards a sensible strategy for achieving the best possible outcomes of a Brexit for both Britain and Europe.

We might now look for a better balanced public and parliamentary debate – one that does not unnecessarily exacerbate existing divisions but allows us to come together in pursuit of a sensible arrangement that meets the interests of all parties; and, with an enhanced appreciation on the part of our interlocutors in the EU that the UK will indeed leave and that the die is now cast, they will, one hopes, no longer be misled by doubts about the British firmness of purpose, so that the negotiations can proceed on the part of both parties on a realistic basis.

We might also hope that we will no longer be encumbered by false trails and unjustified insults.  The new President of the United States can, sadly, be left to pursue his own lonely furrow.

Bryan Gould

2 February 2017