EU referendum, brexit and the aftermath

There's a chain of thought in left politics that is anti-nationalism, arguing that nationalities are social constructs that divide people in a way that power structures exploit.

In abstract, it's true IMHO. But it's an abstraction that holds very little attraction to many people in democratic societies who feel the bonds of kith and kin more keenly. It does appeal to people like me who are part of a globalised white collar class who interact with people like me from all over the world. Hell, I'm the fruit of this interaction - I'm half English, half Puerto Rican. So I have a strong affinity to the worldview.

But white collar classes who have benefited from globalisation have not done enough to look after the blue collar class that has been most hurt by globalisation - the closures of the mines and factories etc etc because of wage competition from places like China where wages and rights are negligible. Jobs and skills that are very geographically and historically situated and that can't easily be transferred into other professions. My dad, who moved from blue to white collar over the course of his career, is now of the view that people should 'get on their bikes' as the phrase once was - but it's hard to see how that's possible for, for example, a huge community of ex-miners who have homes and families and friends in the same place and can't sell their house because they don't own it or nobody will buy it and so can't just up sticks and move to where the jobs are. Most of human history, people stay put and economy happens to them - the massive urbanisation that comes with industrialisation is anomolous in that regard, and de-industrialisation doesn't produce the same economic/geographic pull because it's harder to train people with very specific technical labour-heavy skills to become mobile knowledge workers. Their kids can make that shift - a chunk of my northern friends are people who are the kids of parents who couldn't retrain - but you're left with an underclass of those who aren't malleable enough to adapt to the global capitalist system. And some of them have children who don't find a way to break out of this, not through lack of innate ability but because they don't have the opportunity or, because of their immediate context, they can't see that there is a way out.

Fundamentally I think what we have is a failure of education, not just for school-age people but also for those who are older. Some of that is down to the fact we treat education with a certain amount of disdain - 'those who can't, teach' and all that shit - and we don't see it as an investment in our future and in the vitality of our society.

In that context, it's very easy to construct a narrative for the left-behind that blames everything on the fact that there are immigrants in work. It's not a zero-sum game necessarily - but for example, in the construction industry it's cheaper to hire from the EU than to train locally. We could have put in place rules favouring training locals over hiring immigrants - like the requirement, permissible under EU rules, that all immigrants have some cash and a degree. But we didn't - and I think that part of the reason New Labour didn't is because they bought into the anti-nationalism, 'no borders, no states, no wars!' school of abstract left thinking of many of their middle class, career politician members - people who are a bit older than me but aren't very different in background.

That, to me, is where this has all gone awry. And it's why so much of the discourse feels socialist and nationalist at be same time. People who voted Labour feel like they've not been looked after, but yet immigrants are (they think) thriving. They want solidarity against unscrupulous employers. But they also want solidarity against the depredations of globalisation.

Of course, I'm sure you all know as well as me what we're scared of when you put socialism and nationalism too close to each other.

/drunken ramble