18 November 2019

Gordon Brown: We are becoming a United Kingdom in name only. Politicians must heal the divide

Former British prime minister Gordon Brown highlights a Hope not Hate poll that warns that 77% of British people now think Brexit is feeding prejudice and making the UK more divided than ever.

And as worrying, 67% of black, Asian and minority-ethnic voters now feel strongly that racism is on the rise, only 7% disagree and 56% say they have experienced some form of harassment in the past year. A staggering 70% of 18- to 24-year-olds report racist intimidation on social media.

But our country’s bitter and worsening divisions extend beyond this hostile environment and beyond the current battle between pro- and anti-Brexiteers. The country is now also more sharply divided between north and south, rich and poor, and between the four nations that until recently formed a cohesive UK. And already, after only a few days of campaigning, we have seen a further descent from civility into rancour. [...]

The debasement of our public discourse has been aggravated by the systematic and sustained spraying of untruths, often by foreign state actors – and not in the expectation that their lies will be believed. Success for them is everyone starting to doubt that anything is true: and 44% of remain voters and 51% of leave voters now consider politicians and the media to be habitual liars. We do yet know the full scale of the foreign penetration into our social media and politics, not least because the parliamentary intelligence committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 referendum has deliberately been withheld. But clearly, more than ever before, our politics is being infected and enmities inflamed by dark money and dirty tricks.

Central to the new politics of division and hate across the UK is the displacement of an outward looking patriotism by narrow, adversarial nationalisms which need – and invent – enemies, and make it almost impossible to unite the country around any common purpose or shared direction.

With the SNP now threatening the hardest of “hard” separations and the Conservatives whipping up English nationalism with their claim that under a Labour government Scotland would run England, the great British virtues – tolerance, civic responsibility, reciprocity between nations and pragmatic internationalism – are being consigned to history by a new breed of nationalists not interested in ending divisions but in exploiting them. [...]

There is a serious risk that, far from healing the country’s wounds, the final three weeks of the election campaign may tear us even further apart. Boris Johnson is hardening up an already hard Brexit. By making the no-deal exit that was narrowly avoided in October the most likely outcome of his trade agreement deadline of December 2020, he reminds us that the Conservatives threaten an ever-more-intolerant, inward-looking and isolationist Britain, as well as a deregulated and even more unequal society. [...]

Full article on The Guardian

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