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Leticia Dáquer: OK. So, hi, nice to meet you, should I call you Chris?

Chris Bickerton: Yes, Chris is fine, yeah.

Leticia: OK. We usually start by asking our guests to introduce themselves to our listeners, so if you could just say who you are, where you are, and why we’ve invited you..

Chris: So my name is Chris Bickerton, I’m based at the University of Cambridge, I teach and work and research mainly on contemporary European politics, uhn… and I’ve been following, I suppose, like everybody who’s interested in politics in the UK, the Brexit process, for the last 3 years, and I’m particularly interested in the response of the left, I suppose, to European integration and the position of the British left on Brexit.

OK, so you are exactly what we needed today.

Chris: Good.

Leticia: Thank God, thank goodness for Marta! OK, so, we would like to know, this is gonna be short because we still need to transcribe and translate this, like I told you, so, we… After watching a video, an interview with Galloway, and he was mentioning the need to go… to move… shift further to the left, because what we consider left today is not working. It’s too far away from workers, from people, it doesn’t communicate, it doesn’t… it can’t relate, it’s become… He talks about a bourgeoise left, which doesn’t really relate to what people are actually going through. So we need, according to him, a shift further to the left. Do you think that’s the case? Do you agree with him?

Chris: Ah, I think it’s probably a bit more complicated, I think that… The British Labour Party has done two things over the last few years, and they’ve been going in opposite directions. So, sociologically the party has definitely become dominated by quite young voters, based in urban centres, you know, based in big cities, in London, particularly, and some of the southern university towns… I suppose a kind of middle-class, intellectual, you know, quite young group of voters, but also especially the membership. Ideologically, though, the party has gone very much to the left, since Corbyn became leader, the Labour Party has really given up a lot of what we used to call “New Labour”, and has become much more committed to socialism, at least in the language of the party leaders, and the manifesto which they presented in the last… in the elections last month, was a pretty radical left-wing manifesto, committing itself to socialist transformation. So I think the problem with the LP is not that it’s become a bourgeois party the way that Galloway says, ahm, the problem is, if you wanna be more specific, is that you have this contradictory movement between its ideological lurch to the left and its sociological movement towards the centre.

Leticia: Hmmm OK. Why do you think that this… That the left has been dominated by this group of more intellectuals and so on, what’s happened? Why is it not dominated by workers and unions the way it’s… supposed to be, maybe, in people’s minds? When we think of the left, we think of workers, right, and what happened? Why is this a kind of intellectual elite now, that’s running things?

Chris: Yeah, it’s interesting, I think, there are probably lots of different reasons. The LP in the UK hasn’t given up its formal relationship to the unions. The unions, especially some of the unions, such as Unite, play a very important role in running the party, and the financial dependence of the party on the unions and the contributions the unions make still exists. So I suppose what I said about its kinda sociological transformation should be combined with the fact that, you know, its origins as a party set up by trade unionists, by workers, self-organising and self-representing, that still, I suppose, survives in this relationship they have to the unions. However, as we know, certainly in the case of the UK, the role that the unions play in structuring social life is very different from what it once was, and the effect of the Tory government in the 1980’s, on the British trade unions was very severe, and so unions I think exist as I suppose is sort of well-organised interest group, but they don’t have the same sort of command over society as a whole, something the British working classes, they used to. So you have this, the role that the unions play. For the rest, I think it’s probably a mix of different things, some of which has to do with the fact that when the LP transformed itself into this centrist party, this third-way Blairism of the 1990’s, Blair was running this party, which he was often fighting with. The activists were often ideologically much more to the left than the leadership of the party. And so what Blair tried to do was to try and cut out, if you like, the more sort of activist part of the LP membership, and made it much easier for members to join, it was possible to join the LP and not really do very much, almost like you would like, sort of, I don’t know, Amnesty International and pay your monthly contributions, it was very different from what it meant to be a party member, where you’d go to meetings weekly and were involved in organising the local party, committees and things. So he transformed the membership in that way, as a way of freeing himself of the LP and appealing much more directly to voters. What’s happened since Corbyn is that many people have joined the party and the election of the leader was opened up to ordinary members, rather than just of the members of the Parliamentary Parties, just MPs, and the nature of that membership I think has… is very different. It is much more sort of… activists and much more involved. And so I think there’s a kind of generation of people who are not necessarily representative of society as a whole, which is much more diverse and much… but nevertheless it’s quite an organised group, I mean… Groups like Momentum, which is a sort of national organisation in the LP, a generation of, you know, activists that have managed to really take hold of the LP and through the leadership have managed to create this much more radical party. However, the social sort of identity of these activists is what I described to you, you know. It’s kind of millennial, very London-based, very well educated, and very interested in, you know, ideas and sort of… connecting ideas with policies, and they have really no direct relationship, as far as I can tell, to other elements and structures in British society. And the failure, I think, of the LP was really that over time it became a kind of bubble, sociologically and ideologically. And when you test the bubble out in the general election, you realise that it’s just a bubble.

Leticia: Yeah. This is exactly what we saw in the first referendum, right? That London had a totally different result regarding the Brexit thing when you compared it to the rest of the country. And it happened again, right? In the second referendum. Nobody learned anything? Why didn’t things change between the two, what happened? Because maybe people expected a different outcome because we kind of understood what had happened the first time, and then it happened again. Is it something like ok, ‘so they wanna leave, just let them and they’ll see what’s good for them’, or something else failed even more than it had before. What do you think happened?

Chris: So when you say, when you talk about the first and the second referendums what do you mean exactly?

Leticia: Ah, because the first time it happened it was quite a shock, nobody was expecting it…

Chris: You mean the one in 2016?

Leticia: Yes! Because we saw a big difference between London and the rest of the country, and nobody was expecting that, because it didn’t seem… feasible to anyone that people would think about it and actually come to the conclusion that it would be a good idea to leave the EU, right? And then it happened again, and now we have Boris Johnson and we have all this stuff that nobody understands where it came from. So I… From what I’ve heard around here in Italy, some people were commenting on this, and in Brazil too, people are like “what happened?” Because we thought that we had understood what had happened the first time so maybe something was supposed to have been done to change it and to have a different outcome this time. And then, boom, so what happened?

Chris: I think, uhm… I suppose it’s a lesson in having to be a little bit… wary about the way you inform yourself, where you get information from… Because it’s possible, as I said, that people really operate in a kind of bubble. I think some of it has to do with sort of… misinterpretation, I think, of the original Brexit vote. So back in 2016 when people voted to leave the European Union, the reaction by many people who were very favourable to the European Union was that people had been misled, you know, they had been misled by these slogans, which were really just lies, and people were confused about what they were voting for, they were mistaken, and after three years it becomes more evident that, you know, that it was all a mistake, and therefore people will realised it and will vote differently. And I think we know from the very beginning that was a very dangerous reading of why people vote. I think people voted in large part because they decided that they did want to leave the European Union, and it was not really because they were mistaken, it was really about their views about the EU. Now if you fast forward to 2019, to the end of 2019, you had a lot of people who had gone through these years of, you know, parliamentary debates and negotiations and lots of votes that were rejected… and what they saw as this inability of Parliament to simply deliver the result of the referendum, and you had one party that said, look, we will get Brexit done, was their slogan. And if what you care about is leaving the EU, then you vote for the party that will take you out of the EU. And if your analysis is that people were just mistaken and now they certainly would realise that they made a mistake, then you’re never gonna understand the dynamics. And certainly throughout much of the campaign, it was only at the very end, I think, that the LP sorta of activists and some of the LP leaders realised that they had really underestimated the willingness of a lot of voters in the north of England, who’d voted for Brexit, to vote for the Conservative Party in order to get Brexit. And to abandon the LP that they may have voted for many, many years. It was only at the very end that they started to realise that maybe these voters are not gonna vote for us. And they didn’t. And the Party lost, you know, spectacularly. So I think part of it was really the fact that they underestimated people’s willingness to vote for any party that simply delivers what they wanted to happen, which was for the UK to leave the EU.

Leticia: Do you envision unions becoming stronger after this, as a reaction to this loss of connection with actual workers?

Chris: Trade unions, do you mean?

Leticia: Yes.

Chris: I don’t know, I think uhm… I mean, in some ways I suppose the response of unions might be that they need to change the way that they organise and try and reconnect, I suppose, with lots of voters, but the kind of shifts that are taking place across the labour movement as a whole are partly to do with the politics of past defeats, certainly, especially the defeats of them to Margareth Thatcher, but they’re also to do with the changing structure of British society and the difficulty that unions have, I think, to organise when society is no longer recognisable as an industrial society, when you have a clear arrangement of classes. This new sort of much more disorganised form of society I think is one that the union movement has always struggled with. And there’s some, I suppose, there’s some attempts to sorta recruit workers that are, you know, flexible workers, or workers that are, you know, in a much more precarious position, yes, unions are always trying to adapt to that. But I’m not sure, I think my impression is that at least since the general election, there isn’t any evidence that the unions or the LP is really trying to radically change the way they’re doing things. I think they, at least the candidates seem to be saying is that yes, we need to sorta rethink and adapt, but a real sort of recognition that the LP is in some way, I suppose, captured by a particular part of society and struggles to speak to much of the rest of society, I don’t know if that last bit is coming through, to be honest.

Leticia: Yeah, we see the same thing happening in other countries as well, right? The left is kind of disconnected because of this change in societies as a whole, and it’s a different story in Brazil, because we’re not… so far on, I mean, we have industries and so on, but we still have a lot of precarious jobs and a lot of people who haven’t studied much and we don’t have a long story of unions, of trade unions, and so on, so… It’s a different picture. But in any case, just one last question and then I’ll let you go, what about all these millions of jobs that are going to disappear after Brexit, which is what we have been hearing for a long time now – do you think this is actually going to happen or is this some kind of media terrorism to make people change their minds somehow, or be scared of it? Cause I personally have a lot of friends living in London and a lot of them have friends that have left because they’re not sure what’s gonna happen now, especially with their visas, but even with their jobs themselves. Because things are changing so fast, and they were afraid that they would not be allowed to be in England anymore, and so they just decided to move to other countries. And they, my friends say this is happening all the time. But are these people being replaced by people from the UK or is it just companies closing, shutting down and, you know, jobs disappearing? Is this really going to happen, do you think? Is it really happening to the point that people should be scared?

Chris: I mean, the principal sort of … impact on business, I think, and on the economy as a whole, is always to do with uncertainty. So, in the grand scheme of things, the UK economy is reasonably robust, quite large economy, that has, you know, quite a few sort of world-leading, you know, sectors, and is also very adaptable, because of the flexibility of this labour market. What’s made certainly things difficult over the last few years, what’s affected and vested sentiment, there’s been a lot of, sort of, a lot of investments that have been put on hold, not necessarily, you know, taken away forever, but certainly put on hold, has just been that nobody knows what the new relationship will be to the UK’s biggest trading block, which is the European Union single market. Now that sort of uncertainty won’t, I think, come to an end at the end of January 2020, when the UK leaves the EU, because there’s a trade agreement that needs to be negotiated with the EU. It may be that actually the agreement is negotiated quickly, or maybe less quickly, but I think once there’s a fair amount of certainty about the kind of relationship the UK will have to the EU, whatever that certainty, whatever form that takes, partly because… The fear, I think, is that there’s just a sort of a complete collapse in relations and the UK crashes out, in so far as that’s been avoided, because we now have a framework for an agreement, it may be that fears come up again at the end of the year, about what is gonna happen if the UK doesn’t have an agreement by the end of 2020. But nevertheless, if we put that to one side, even if the agreement is not one that, you know, people would ideally have wanted, depending on whichever sector they’re working in, once you get a framework for certainty, then you begin to plan for the future. Like I said, the UK has a generally, it’s quite a large internal market of its own, but it also has quite a few competitive sectors, which I think will be able to adapt. In terms of migration, I think it’s a bit more complicated. I think the impact I think is likely to be felt on the composition of migration, rather than the absolute level of migration. The UK has an open labour market and it requires very high levels of migrant labour to sustain itself. It’s impossible, I think, to really conceive, overnight, migrant labour would be substituted for British workers, they just simply don’t exist. Over time, I would hope that British companies would start to invest more in training their own employees, which they always… many of them managed to avoid investing in any sort of training, ‘cause they can always hire someone else. And that’s one of the great failures, I think, of an open labour market, is that for an employer’s perspective, not from the worker’s perspective, from an employer’s perspective it’s great, because you don’t have to invest in your own employees ‘cause they have no bargaining power, because you can just employ someone else. And we’ve seen already since 2016 that there’s been more investment by employers in training and also in some aspects of technology and automation, simply because they’re being forced, actually, to invest in ways that they didn’t have to before, ‘cause they could just rely on relatively cheap labour. So I think that’s something that may change, and that’d be very positive, but in terms of migration, it’s more likely I think that if there’s any sort of… there’s an effect, it’s gonna be that less EU workers will be based in the UK. But more workers from non-EU countries would come in, so workers from Latin America, workers from the Indian subcontinent, they would come and work in the UK simply because they would be as competitive as somebody coming from the EU, and so the composition of the UK’s migrant population could be a little bit less European and a bit more global, I think that’s a possible effect.

Leticia: OK. Alright, thank you VERY MUCH for your time and I’ll stop recording now. I’ll send you the link when we’ve published the episode just so you can see what it looks like.

Chris: Excellent.

Leticia: Thanks A LOT, ok? This was really nice.

Chris: My pleasure, good talking to you.

Leticia: Thanks, ciao, bye-bye.

Chris: Bye-bye.