Ross: When you see these people who
did vote
leave so maligned
and derided by those who
wanted to remain.
Just give us a snapshot from your
point of view of
who these people are
and what their economic prospects
have been like
prior to and now after
the Brexit referendum.
Lee Jones: I think Brexit was the
most
strongly class correlated vote
in recent decades.
So now the the class basis
of the two main political parties
has almost
totally broken down.
Ross: Right. Lee Jones:
Traditionally Labour was the party
of the working class
and the Tories the party of the
propertied
and now that correlation is almost
totally
evaporated. Ross: And was that the
property owning democracy
that came in was a sort of moment
where
everybody then became this
amorphous middle class as Tony
Blair.
Lee Jones: I don't think that they
did actually become
middle class but I think as Lisa
says the Labour
party shifted rightwards
and triangulated towards the middle
class and what essentially happened
was the
working classes were to a large
extent
left behind,
they were- Lisa Mckenzie:left left
out.
Lee Jones: Yes certainly left out so
they feel I think largely
unrepresented
by the political class,
they feel the political class has
become
homogenous,
identikit political parties
with no real differences between
them
and working class interests are no
longer being
represented in the political system
and that's shown in all kinds of
polls it's shown
in the very low turnout for
working class communities
and Brexit it was different in that
people
who had abandoned voting for a long
time
or maybe had never voted,
voted for the first time because
they saw
a unique opportunity to make change
in their lives.
This promised a rupture in the
system
and an attempt to discipline the
political class
and make it listen to them
and represent their interests in
politics once
more. Ross: That rupture
and that action has it made the
political
class sit up and listen? Lee Jones:
I Think it has
forced them to listen to the people
when they haven't for a long time.
So last general election
both Labour and the Conservatives
ran
on a platform of implementing
Brexit.
However because of the hung
parliament
we now have many people trying to
overturn
the referendum result.
So there are certain factions in
Parliament
that still refuse to accept the
will of the people the will of the
majority of the people.
Ross: What does that say about our
political class?
Lee Jones: It says that the politics
of representative government have
broken
down and really Brexit is the
kind of end point of this long term
crisis.
The withdrawal of both parties from
their traditional
bases and their move into
inter-elite policy networking
at the EU level so they retreat
from the accountability to their own
voters
and their more accountable to other
governments
at the European level where they
lock in the
neo-liberal policies
and they did that for a long time
and that is a real crisis in which
right
wing populism can fill that void
and can flourish as we see across
the continent.
So I see Brexit as a possibility
of saying to the political
establishment
you have actually to be accountable
back
to the voters again.
Theres an opportunity here to
restore
representative government
and avert the crisis the populism
injects into European
