Fences: A Brexit Diary

August 3, 2016 5:48 AM

" When everyone’s building a fence, isn’t it a true fool who lives out in the open?" Author Zadie Smith (lotsa previously on the Blue) ruminates on Brexit, as well as class, race, and an uncertain future. (slNYRB)
posted by Kitteh (19 comments total)

“Arsonist” feels like the more accurate term.
posted by oheso at 6:39 AM on August 3, 2016

The first had his sights on the Trojan horse of “sovereignty,” from inside of which empty symbol an unfettered deregulated financial sector was supposed to leap.

I'll stop spoiling it. Go read TFA already.
posted by oheso at 6:40 AM on August 3, 2016

"...We always wanted to be seen to be right. To be on the right side of an issue. More so even than doing anything. Being right was always the most important thing.”

Smith gets that this is a clever remark, but by the time she's through feeling guilty about having bought a winning ticket in the house lottery, and moved on to teaching NYU students in Paris over the summer it's not clear that she really understands what it means. You can be "right" about every question and still be playing on the wrong team. It's not about knowing the correct analysis, it's about the material conditions that sustain your life and what you do to keep living. What do you need to do to have the money to buy a house at the right time for the market? What do you need to do to get someone to pay you to hang out "teaching" rich kids to be writers?

You mainly don't get to choose, I mean, who wouldn't take the money when they offer it to you and try not to think where it came from? And the problem is that if you don't take the money, you don't get plaintive, sensitive, politically right-thinking, well-written essays into the NYRB so, you effectively don't exist in the world of the Zadie Smiths.
posted by ennui.bz at 6:59 AM on August 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

Now, a year later, Ofsted has judged it officially “Good,” and if I know the neighborhood, this will mean that more middle-class, usually white, parents will take what they consider to be a risk, move into the environs of the school, and send their kids here.

Zadie Smith's social antennae, usually so well tuned to the nuances of the British class system, have let her down for once. 'Good' is the second-best rating a school can achieve (below 'Outstanding') and this is one of the subtle ways in which the educational system reinforces social stratification. Working-class parents will assume that 'good' means good, without necessarily picking up the unspoken message, 'good enough for the likes of you'. Middle-class parents will assume it means second-best, i.e. not very good, and will look for somewhere better. Thus the class system perpetuates itself.
posted by verstegan at 7:15 AM on August 3, 2016 [6 favorites]

This is moving and beautiful, with real insight into the current political mood in the UK but also the US.
posted by Superplin at 7:17 AM on August 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

I kept reading pieces by proud Londoners speaking proudly of their multicultural, outward-looking city, so different from these narrow xenophobic places up north.

I think there has been a social gulf between two ways of making judgements. Intellectual, graduate folk like us read up the papers and the economic analyses. Those 'xenophobic' white working class northerners paid less attention to textual evidence. They took a look at Jean-Claude Juncker's sneering face. They remembered what happened to Greece. They noticed how Angela Merkel seemed to believe she was entitled to open the borders of Europe at will. Do we like the idea of people like that being in charge, they asked? Not much.

Remain ran the wrong campaign. When was anti-EU sentiment at its lowest? Under Thatcher. That was because people knew she hated and distrusted Brussels and was happy to handbag it. So they thought "That whole business looks a bit dodgy to me, but if she's alright with it I suppose it must be OK". With Cameron we were treated to the spectacle of him being completely unable to stop Juncker's appointment in spite of almost begging in public, and his humiliating inability to secure any material concessions before the referendum.

We needed a leader to say "Yes, bits of it stink, but keep us in and I will kick serious arse about the lack of democracy and the mad commitment to punitive austerity." But Cameron was not in a position to say anything like that with credibility even if he had wanted to.
posted by Segundus at 7:33 AM on August 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

Verstegan-- she knows 'Good' isn't the top ranking, and see's the 'Good' as an acceptable risk for middle-classers to chance it in the postal code vs. price lottery. In the very next sentence:

If this process moves anything like it does in New York, the white middle-class population will increase, keeping pace with the general gentrification of the neighborhood, and the boundaries of the “catchment area” for the school will shrink, until it becomes, over a number of years, almost entirely homogeneous, with dashes of diversity, at which point the regulatory body will award its highest rating at last

posted by Static Vagabond at 7:35 AM on August 3, 2016 [6 favorites]

In Britain Nigels come and go, but Ruperts are forever. My life and the lives of my fellow Britons are at all times at least partially governed by a permanent, unelected billionaire class, who own the newspapers and much of the TV, and through which absurd figures like Farage are easily puffed up, thus swinging elections and shaping policy

Not just Britain. Murdoch's media holdings account for 59% of the sales of all daily newspapers in Australia. In the US, he's also a significant factor, with ownership of Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NY Post, and publishing house Harper Collins.

"I give instructions to my editors all round the world, why shouldn't I in London?" -- Rupert Murdoch
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:37 AM on August 3, 2016

There is something strange about this article, which is of course well written and honest in it's own way. It's something I recognize from leftist friends and I've been struggling to pinpoint it. But maybe it's there in the anecdote about her daughter's friend. Why don't they arrange that playdate!??!! I just don't get it. It makes no sense. Their kids like each other. They live close to each other. No doubt Zadie Smith is able to pick the kids up from school and serve tea - and maybe that would give the working-class mum some time off. Maybe Zadie Smith would meet some interesting people. There is no good reason for not arranging that playdate, and even the most conservative people I know would 100% do that. Why doesn't Zadie Smith do it?? It's not like she should be doing social work or forcing her kid to play with the kids from the other side of the road. The kids were friends.
To me, it's like a very strange form of reverse humble-bragging - there's an implicit "now I've gotten out of the council houses, and I can't ever again talk to someone who lives there because I'm too posh for that". I see it a lot on the left, and I believe it is one of the big problems on the left though even now, I'm not really certain I've described the thing that worries me.
It's not that they are enjoying the luxuries they can afford now, I think most would find that a completely fair reward for hard work and talent. It's that attitude of superiority, like a caricature of the class-system they have managed to cross.

We live in a similar situation to that she described, with a mix of moderately rich landlords, very poor immigrants and poor whites, and incoming middle-class, and the other day, my daughter explained how she hates the well-meaning middle-class lefties in our neighborhood exactly as much as she hates the smug 1percenters. I think she's reacting to the same thing.

(sorry for the rant)
posted by mumimor at 8:12 AM on August 3, 2016 [7 favorites]

If you have money and a house and an indexed pension and a Volvo and all that other middle class stuff, you are never going to understand what it's like to not have those things. All of the progressive slogans in the world will not change that, nor the alienation those of use without those things feel when encountering the bourgeoisie like Zadie Smith.
posted by My Dad at 8:24 AM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

We needed a leader to say "Yes, bits of it stink, but keep us in and I will kick serious arse about the lack of democracy and the mad commitment to punitive austerity."

...you think Leave voters were generally anti-austerity? "Austerity" is code for "cutting social services to the poor." I only observe from the outside--did I miss something where this group (as a whole) now thinks the dole should be expanded, the cuts to support for the disabled should be rolled back, and the policy to kick people who have "too much" council housing because their kids moved out and they have an extra bedroom out of those homes eliminated?
posted by praemunire at 8:29 AM on August 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

The tall, narrow Victorian house I bought fifteen years ago, though it is exactly the same kind of house my middle-class friends owned when I was growing up, is now worth an obscene amount of money, and I worried that she might think I had actually paid that obscene amount of money to own it.

What a bizarre thing to worry about. Why would it matter, to those of us on the losing end, whether the lottery Smith won was the income lottery or housing-appreciation lottery? What possible difference does it make? Does she imagine that housing speculation is somehow more ethical than speculating in the markets and spending your winnings on a house? Bourgeois morality is weird.
posted by enn at 8:52 AM on August 3, 2016 [3 favorites]

Sorry, my previous comment was excessively snippy, I apologize. But I'm genuinely confused. Yes, one of the rallying cries was "give the NHS the EU money," but, when it comes to existing domestic policy, does the English conservative working class really get up in arms about the undoubted rolling back of the English welfare state that's been going on for the last thirty-odd years? It hasn't seemed to me that that has been the case. Everyone can say "help my country first!" when you're thinking of terms of country vs. rest of the world. But when it becomes a question of deciding who to help within the country, the group of the deserving seems to magically shrink. And then you get Nick and Margaret going around hectoring people for being scroungers. In the U.S. you will hear tons of Trump voters saying we shouldn't accept refugees because we should help the poor at home, but then turn around and complain about those lazy poor people sitting around all day on welfare. So does Leave really represent an embrace of a restored or expanded English welfare state?
posted by praemunire at 9:05 AM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

What a bizarre thing to worry about. Why would it matter, to those of us on the losing end, whether the lottery Smith won was the income lottery or housing-appreciation lottery?

I totally identify with that tension, actually; grew up poor, am now mid-middle-class, live in a mixed-class neighbourhood, and (a) still have a fairly large chip on my shoulder against "the rich" and (b) am constantly, acutely paranoid that neighbours who aren't as well off as I am look at me and think "that rich bastard."

So while I'm not living in a mansion or driving a Bentley, I do feel a bit like people think well, there's that guy in his fancy shirt with his pretty bicycle sometimes. It shouldn't worry me. It worries me.

There's a whole crazy ball of notions that get packed into transitioning from lower- to middle-class, and part of that (for me, I'm not speaking for Smith) is the carrying forward of all my old resentments against the better-off and the projection of those emotions onto people around me.
posted by Shepherd at 9:08 AM on August 3, 2016 [13 favorites]

So does Leave really represent an embrace of a restored or expanded English welfare state?

That in its essence is the complaint about Corbyn. By not being clear and loud about the consequences of Brexit for the working class, for students, for single parents, for the elderly, he has led the left-wing brexiteers to believe and propose that there would be a left-wing version of Brexit available. Which is the worst rubbish I've heard yet, even including everything Trump ever said.
posted by mumimor at 9:11 AM on August 3, 2016 [2 favorites]

If you have money and a house and an indexed pension and a Volvo and all that other middle class stuff, you are never going to understand what it's like to not have those things.

no. Smith has all those things, but her whole shtick is that she understands the other side of the class because she climbed over it and she does. problem is that understanding, being right, is irrelevant.

if you sat down and cataloged all of Zadie Smith's she would be far to the left of the political discussion off the bourgeoisie in the US, to the left of metafilter, but if Johnson and Cameron are "arsonists" then she is on the side of putting out the fire. that is, she just wishes things could be back to where they were before the brexit vote ie. she's chuffed into a reactionary position. she needs to reaffirm the existing threatened order because she fears what is coming. Which is exactly the position of "liberals" in the US, who are far tooto the right of her...
posted by ennui.bz at 9:34 AM on August 3, 2016 [5 favorites]

Shepherd, thanks for the insight. It makes sense. But that would be a good reason people in some areas trust conservatives more.

This is only anecdotal, but: when my youngest was in kindergarten, I became friends with the wife of our local big-shot, a landlord and business owner who totally sets the agenda in our area. She was a stay-at-home mum, and a devote Christian, both very rare here. And she would always engage with all the other mothers at the kindergarten, and the teachers and staff. And everyone still loves her in spite of her politics. Whereas those new middle-class lefties who were/are gentrifying our neighborhood were always treating the kitchen staff like serfs and getting into arguments with the teachers. And like Smith, they avoided the many poor parents regardless of their color like they were dangerous. I had the impression that they felt the poverty was contagious. Smile at an immigrant and BOOM, you'd be back in social housing. Also, I never got how people whose parents had been working hard in industry or service could be arrogant towards workers.

Now, with your thoughts, I can see what might have been going on, but back then, I felt the rich conservative Christian lady had my back, and the lefties despised me, and I know we were many who felt that way.

(I was personally an outlier, because I am an academic with a middle class background, and it was a very bad divorce that had gotten me into poverty and a rental apartment. So I knew the lingo of those new people and eventually befriended some, but I also felt what I saw as their disgust and fear).
posted by mumimor at 9:42 AM on August 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

Zadie Smith's social antennae, usually so well tuned to the nuances of the British class system, have let her down for once. 'Good' is the second-best rating a school can achieve (below 'Outstanding') and this is one of the subtle ways in which the educational system reinforces social stratification.

Only two? Waugh, writing in 1928, had four. Highly tuned, his social antennae, though perhaps his ranking is based on nothing more than imagination. Anyone?
posted by BWA at 11:03 AM on August 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

BWA: Only two? Waugh, writing in 1928, had four. Highly tuned, his social antennae, though perhaps his ranking is based on nothing more than imagination. Anyone?

Oftsed rates schools into one of 4 categories: Outstanding, Good, Requires Improvement [formerly 'Satisfactory'], Inadequate.

Some explanation
posted by James Scott-Brown at 2:04 AM on August 4, 2016