Racism and Brexit: notes towards an antiracist populism

ABSTRACT

This article takes Brexit and Nigel Farage’s right-wing populism as a starting point to consider the populist politics of racism and antiracism. I demonstrate how two key figures of right-wing populist discourse – the “white working class” and the “liberal elite” – have come to describe a political grammar with a widespread influence and explanatory resonance across the political spectrum, and which have as a result formed a racial common sense in Brexit Britain. Rather than accept the terms of a debate that has been set by the populist right, I draw on Ernesto Laclau to describe a rival politics of antiracist populism. Although it is far from straightforward to navigate, engagement on the terrain of the popular is not optional if we are to counter a fatalistic tendency to conceive of antiracism as a minority or elite concern.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• antiracism
• Brexit
• populism
• Laclau
• elites

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ben Pitcher http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8071-2643

Notes

1. It is misplaced to read such concerns as a result of the influence of the far right: it is possible to trace the figure of the “white working class” in its present incarnation to the unfolding of communitarian social policy under New Labour (Pitcher 2009: chapter 3).

2. This article will try to avoid excursus into the detail of Laclau’s conceptual universe. My objective here is to draw on the political logic of populism to provide a perspective on racism and antiracism in the Brexit conjuncture rather than serve as a full elaboration of Laclau’s theory. Those interested in a bit more detail could take a look at Laclau (2005a, 2005b, 1990, 1996) and Laclau and Mouffe (2001). For a recent consideration of how to approach populism as a political logic see De Cleen, Glynos, and Mondon (2018).

3. The role played by the press in a media democracy (see Wodak 2015 § 14.57) is of course significant in itself. The British media, and particularly the BBC, have consistently given Farage coverage and airtime disproportionate to UKIP’s electoral successes. One obvious explanation of this exposure is that the media have indeed taken on trust Farage’s self-characterization as a “man of the people”, and that this is partly to be understood as the critical failure of a media class who have accepted their own negative characterization as an out-of-touch metropolitan elite. Thanks to Gavan Titley for inspiring this last point. See also Mills (2016).

4. The pressing need for a populist alternative to neoliberalism in France will not go away. While in 2017 the electorate eventually rallied to neoliberal Macron against Le Pen, the popular democratic tide on which her party rose remains unaddressed, and is only likely to amplify further in the years to 2022 however many concessions Macron makes towards the far right.

5. Whether Spanish left populist party Podomos’s “patriotic” construction of a territorially sovereign people manages to oppose “corporations and banks, not foreigners and refugees” (Gerbaudo 2017, 56) without racist consequences remains to be seen.