What's in a postcode?

Posted on: 8 February 2017 by Lewis Johnson in Posts

As I step off my local bus and walk down the street on my way home I see two things: a boarded up Victorian shop-front, the second floor and attic level newly collapsed onto the street, exposing the remaining interior structure to the elements; and a ‘Leave’(EU) sticker placed in the window of a house several doors down. The dilapidated scene of this street is harrowingly neglected, but not uncommon among the working class postcodes of North Liverpool. Since my adolescence, Anfield has always been classified as a financially poor, socially deprived, ward – today, these symptoms have manifested into toxic ideas concerning culture.

In recent years, Nigel Farage has shaped his political oratory into ‘anti-establishment’ rhetoric; Farage speaks, directly from the podium, to the disenfranchised: the people who live in inhabitable rented dwellings, work on zero-hour contracts, and are not provided with basic council services. The people who leave home at six in the morning for a twelve hour factory shift, earning £80.40 (pre-tax), the people whose wages do not match the rising cost of energy bills and layer their clothing to remain warm, and the people who are forced to choose between feeding their families or feeding themselves. These are the people who Nigel Farage speaks to: the demoralised, the desperate.

The people in my neighbourhood live in one of the world’s richest countries, but they do not experience the state’s affluence. Rather, the people of Anfield are informed that their library can only remain open for two days a week - staffed solely by volunteers – and that the national debt is too severe for any increased, or sustained, spending in their community. At the same time, they are also watching Nigel Farage – posturing himself in front of a very large red bus – as he exclaims to all who will listen that their country is forced to donate £350 million to the EU every week. To people who, sometimes, are unable to even afford ten pound for the gas meter, such a figure is truly unfathomable. To them, Farage’s tongue speaks with enlightened political practicality; he is a preacher of biblical quality, striving to improve the quality of their lives.

Theresa May recently issued a speech in which she claimed ‘If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’. Perhaps this is where the working class communities were going wrong. As citizens of Europe, and therefore the world, were they not condemning their own society through far reaching international thought? While the government wrested with reducing the national debt, surely fiscal donations to the EU and basic local spending were incompatible. Under the arguments of Farage, money needed to keep community centres open was instead sent to the Belgium capital where it was then allocated for road works in Calais.

The EU does receive substantial figures of cash from the UK every week, but it gives much more back in return; thanks to the EU, the UK now enjoys extensive environmental protections, lucrative international trade deals, and free movement within the member states. Plus, ninety percent of the gifted money is returned to the UK through EU funded investments; only the cash is distributed evenly across the whole country, without a London centred Tory bias. However, the working classes are not always afforded this perspective. Rather, after six years of government cuts they finally see a politician who speaks in their own phatic language and argues for greater public spending. To the people of Anfield, too poor to envisage a holiday to Europe in their current financial position, surely the loss of their EU citizenship will be worth the improvements felt in their neighbourhood.

The conditions which caused Brexit did not begin with the inchoate ‘Leave’ campaign on the 15th April 2016: they began in 2010 when David Cameron’s coalition government made its first cut for social spending. While working class citizens do not usually enjoy the luxuries of their middle and upper class peers, never have they been stripped of so much so quickly. In the space of six years, Britain has suffered a fall in living standards to now match those of our Victorian ancestors; the introduction of uncompromising benefit sanctions; and an explosion of food banks across the country.

I do not agree with Brexit, and I loathe Farage, but I do understand why my neighbours may have voted ‘Leave’ – even if I did feel like shouting and swearing at them in the street on the 23rd June. The term ‘anti-establishment’ is deployed regularly by the Right to acquire votes among the working classes, and it has succeeded with unnerving success. To live in a society consistently penalised by its government for no other reason than class prejudice, and austerity ideology, an instinct for political rebellion becomes understandable. A government cannot expect to misuse its people, degrading their living standards with such a lack of care, and not expect malcontent to fester. Politicians such as Farage, and further afield like Trump, are capitalising on the rightly dissatisfied working classes to further their own scheming and careers; dissatisfaction caused by far-removed, apathetic, politicians and shifted onto foreign scapegoats. So long as we live in a country where the working classes are downtrodden by the government, they will always be exploitable by the Right. To neutralise the Right-Wing movements spreading across Europe and the States, we need a return to compassionate governing; where all citizens are equal to each other in rights and opportunities, regardless or postcode or class.