Translation and subtitles by PEPPER & LALASPAIN *** SONG LIVES FOR EVER ***
United Kingdom?
[wind blowing]
[waves crashing]
It's just basically an island,
about 26 miles from France.
By by by water. [chuckles]
But I wouldn't go in a rowing boat.
And I'd lock your lorry up if you're coming back.
[laughing]
I voted to leave...
because I read a book once,
and it said, it was about relationships.
and it said: "Early in a relationship,
people sometimes get
an alarm bell ringing that it's not working out.
But they choose to ignore it."
And I saw that happening with us being in the EU.
And it sounds ridiculous, but it was about a cucumber!
The... I'm certain I read in the paper,
much to my as... bemusement,
that the EU was saying
cucumbers were no long...
the curly ones that were misshaped,
that wasn't acceptable.
They had to be a uniform shape and size.
And that was the beginning for me.
And little by little, I started to notice that,
our sovereignty and democracy, as I saw it, was eroding.
2016 was a year that...
that will go down in history as the year...
that yet again,
the British destroyed the European Union.
[water lapping the shore]
2016 was a year...
that finally the people got what they wanted.
And 2016 was a year...
that will go down in history
as the biggest democratic vote the UK's ever undertaken.
Some people are just struggling with...
the circumstances that they are in themselves.
And they just desperately need somebody to blame.
Brexit was a mash-up of the words "Britain Exit."
defining the...
the case before Britain to leave the European Union.
It happened in 2016...
in the United Kingdom.
The vote was whether or not Britain should leave or remain in the EU.
And how that'd affect the country and mostly Europe.
It does not affect where England would be
geographically on the map, as many people would say,
we're now out of Europe. That's just irrelevant.
We'll always be part of Europe but not part of the European Union.
Brexit was one a very rare opportunities,
for people to say what they wanted to say or actually,
it's one of these very rare opportunities
where they could say "Fuck off" to the government.
I didn't think that we'd leave.
I thought the overall look would be to stay, you know.
I was quite confused a little bit whether
"Have I made the right decision? Have I made the wrong decision?"
One of those kind of feelings.
Well, I was quite surprised that Brexit got the vote.
Very surprised indeed.
I'm a pissed of Brit.
I'm Ibrahim Ismail.
I'm a Muslim and proud.
I'm a Boltonian.
From "Boltopia."
Where are we?
We're on a... we're on a precipice at the moment.
And we can either fall or fly.
If the "Remain" camp was Project Fear,
then, in my opinion, a one-word,
description of those who...
voted to leave would be freedom-lovers.
A terrible shock when I got up in the morning and...
realized we were out. I just sat and cried.
That's right, I cried, yeah?
My heart said "Out."
But my head said "In", so I voted in.
I'm Charlotte, I'm in London,
and I voted for Brexit,
and I support UKIP.
People essentially want British money, British funds,
British work to stay in Britain for Brits.
And really, you can't complain about that.
History tells us that any empire,
from the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire,
French Empire, the British Empire, the Soviet Empire.
if an empire gets too big, it implodes.
And I felt the European Union
is too big and it is going to implode.
At this age, it takes a lot to shock me.
It's like "Where were you when President Kennedy was assassinated?"
I'll always remember, I was filling the kettle and it said
about it, you know, and I went...
My jaw dropped, and...
I was so proud of my fellow voters,
and I thought, that will show the politicians,
who think that we're a stupid bunch of shopkeepers,
as Hitler said it, that we've got a mind,
and we'll only take so much, and then it's... "No-no."
Scotland is fucking raging
over the EU referendum results.
You only have to look
at the map of where the results came from
to see how Scotland voted
versus how other parts of the UK voted.
And this is a consistent chain that we're seeing again and again
as the UK votes collectively
on really quite urgent issues.
Here we are in Plymouth, welcome to Plymouth.
And this is an area which would have voted
which did vote predominantly for exit.
It's a very easy area to...
go out on a right wing sentiment of vote to push to the right
because it's economically very vulnerable.
It's very deprived. There's a lot of people,
on zero-hour-contracts here.
There's a lot of people who are being termed now,
the JAMs, the "just about managing."
They are working essentially to pay for food,
rent and bills and that's it.
Whether they're right or wrong, if you ask someone on the street,
if... what they think about the state of Britain, most people will say,
that it's declining, so they'd look for a change, whether it's...
something they know as a definite or something that's just a chance.
Unfortunately, I was unable to vote in the referendum,
as I am under the age of 18.
I think people are still shocked about the result in the end.
They didn't expect it.
They thought: " Okay, we'll put our opinions down and then actually...
Maybe, obviously...
the result turned out to be an exit.
And it was quite a shock so,
it's going to be a massive change in the country, I think, yeah...
and people are merely...
Not really decided, obviously, what's gonna happen
We don't know exact... I mean we've left,
fair enough, but officially,
in a couple years' time once everything's get settled down,
I think there's going to be massive changes
where people haven't really thought about deeply,
or haven't been told about of what actually it means.
All change, as far as I'm concerned,
all change is really, really good.
All change creates movement,
creates new money, creates new opportunities,
and and that would be my personality,
would be to just shut my eyes and jump and do it.
We're just sick to the back teeth
of the politicians turning around and saying to us:
"Oh, you disagree with us?"
"We're not getting her point across."
"Oh, you don't understand the issues."
"You've been lied to..."
Well, no, the message is: "We do understand."
"We're sick of your arrogance,
we're sick of your not listening to us,
and by voting to get out of Europe,
we hoped to get rid of, at least one layer,
of these arrogant parasites."
Everybody thinks about the world in a way...
of how it is now.
And things in the world have only really been stable,
and we've been lucky with that...
in relatively pretty much just this century,
in fact, not even that.
And I think everybody's got very comfortable with the idea of stability.
And I suppose I had a question in the back of my mind of
what if the world becomes unstable?
And in that circumstance...
I'd want a government...
where they're accountable to the people...
who've voted for them.
And I felt like the little man has more say...
just to their own government,
than a central giant European government,
that's almost like a global conglomerate.
I mean I got called uneducated.
I was an un... an uneducated man,
by a lady in the office, and...
But everyone's...
Everyone's entitled to their vote.
That's the beauty, you know, of the UK,
the British government, you know.
You're entitled to your vote, and you have a right to vote,
and it does matter whichever you vote for,
but you've still got your own opinion.
I think...
Remain voters are smarter than Leave voters.
And that makes me a snob?
Fine!
I think the Leave vote...
was very enticing because it's simultaneously
rebellious and patriotic.
It takes a fuck load of boxes
for someone who's driven by emotion
and doesn't really understand what's going on.
I think...
Remain voters,
I think it's harder to come to a pro-Remain decision,
because it takes more work,
it takes more reading.
Very few people have an emotional connection to the EU,
because by definition it's this large...
relatively faceless body.
Because it's an administrative body,
and that's what they like, that's what they are.
One of the crazy regulations,
that the EU imposed on the sheep industry
is the electronic tally.
And you will see the sheep behind us.
They have a tag in each ear.
The yellow one is an electronic
chip with an individual ID.
The other tag is exactly the same without the chip.
Well, one tag would have done.
We get problems with fly strike.
The tags fall out.
So...
It's been successful in a way...
But one tag's fine.
Two tags are so very unnecessary.
Over 60% of the fish caught...
within the whole of Europe is caught within British waters.
So this area, this is area seven,
stretches from the Davis Straight,
right round through to the Isle of Man.
And in that area the UK can take 12% of the catch.
So, if you compare that with, say France,
who we share the English Channel with,
and share these waters with...
France can take 60% of the European shares.
So for a long time,
as fishermen we felt that we had a very bad deal.
Europeans living in the UK were not allowed to vote
in the referendum on Brexit,
which is fine, you know?
They're not hosts there.
They haven't got a British passport.
They're just guests, you know, coming an living and going.
That's fine.
If they were, you know, allowed to vote,
the result would probably be different.
If I was allowed to vote...
I would vote to leave.
Funny enough.
Before we went into Europe,
we was the second richest country in the world.
All we ever do in this country,
is give, give, give, give, give, give, give.
When were in the EU,
you know, Poland's economy in factories is fried,
and yet we're still given them, like...
all that money, millions and millions of pounds.
Every time something happens in the world Britain
helps out well why should we? No one ever helps us.
My parents came from Ghana...
and they came when in the 20's and it was really really hard.
But... and for them to... they hadn't didn't have many opportunities
and they worked really hard and worked the way up.
My Mom's a teacher, my Dad works in town planning.
And I can understand their reasons for voting out.
Because over the years they keep saying
how much easier it is for people who come over here
and go straight away on benefits.
They come over here and they don't...
all they've got to do is get pregnant and they get given a house
whereas people already in this country who need it don't get it.
So it was more the...
Would I say the piss takers? The mickey...!
The ones that take the mickey out of the system.
That's what confuted my Mum's reason for voting out.
I wouldn't say that I'm a particular fan of the European Union,
and that, you know, it's a neoliberal institution.
It isn't very good at supporting
ordinary working class people in their rights.
But I wasn't in it...
it wasn't an election about whether I like it or not.
It was about an election whether we remain within it or not.
So I voted remain for a number of reasons,
largely because the election as it ended up being,
wasn't an election about whether we remain or leave the European Union.
But it became an election about immigration.
Political correctness influenced the Brexit vote
by making large sections of the population
who had perfectly reasonable concerns about immigration
feel as though they were not even able
to open their mouths to voice these opinions,
for fear of being shouted down by their contemporaries,
for fear of possibly even being criminalized
if they express this on social media
or in any other published form.
And I think...
you have what is now really the silent majority
of the people who want to say these things,
but feel so restricted by the culture that we're living in,
that they have no way to express their opinions.
I think the UK as an open country.
They don't want, we don't want to...
And I'm gonna use... it's white people aren't allowed to be...
They're the only people that can't be racist.
Everybody else can say what to think.
White people aren't allowed to say what they think
because they're gonna be a racist.
I think Britain, they don't want our freedom
and express freedom of expression of speech.
We can say what we like... within reason obviously, you know.
But... all of a sudden there's a lot of
Muslim people coming in who have different values.
They treat their women different. They treat, ahm...
society different and people are afraid.
You know, they're saying... because these people do not value life.
They value death.
And... I don't mean all of them, you know, I just mean the radicals.
But people just feel they're all radicals and they're not.
People act... whenever you're scared, people would worry.
But no, we like...
Personally as a Brit, I like the Royal family.
I like the pomp and circumstance.
I like the uniforms, I like the military.
I just was always proud to be British,
very proud to be British and it's being eroded away.
You know, the fact that you have to go to Brussels to ask:
"Can you do stuff?"
I'm not...
learned up enough on it to know what,
you know, give you a specific but, ahm...
I just think somebody needs to be accountable if something
has cocked up if it goes wrong.
We can vote out if our government's not working.
We can vote them out and put somebody else in.
If Brussels cock up, your stuck with them.
The very next day after Brexit we experienced
the backlash almost straightaway.
It was the very next morning driving to school.
Coming up to school is a busy rush.
The traffic is absolutely awful
and there was somebody behind me was trying to get passed.
I pulled over onto the side to help them get passed.
So then he pulled up alongside me, put his window down
and it was the absolute most foul abuse.
I thought if I had stepped out of the car
I thought I would get attacked.
And it was basically that we voted out
why are you still here in really awful terms.
But it was the first time that my daughter
has ever experienced racial abuse in her 12 years.
And she was absolutely horrified.
She was shaken to the core.
She didn't sleep for a good two,
three weeks properly afterwards.
She was very very, she was waking up
at night screaming having nightmares.
She wasn't sure what about but she knew
that she was feeling unsafe.
She'd heard things at school.
She had Polish friends, English friends, Asian friends
and nobody knew what was going to happen.
And because she had experienced this the very next day
and a number of occasions after that she
was absolutely traumatized.
I think we ended up leaving voting leave because
there were a lot more people in the country that live in
different circumstances than big cities.
Most of the big cities voted to remain.
But a lot of the people that live in smaller towns
and out in the country are really affected by
the recession and I think they blame
a lot of Europe for everything.
And a lot of them aren't cosmopolitan as big cities are.
And there is a lot of racism, and a lot of thinking that
the refugees and migrants and it's all that
in the press about them all coming over.
And I think that's why I think
they just didn't want them to come.
They thought that leaving Europe
would stop it, which isn't true.
A lot of assumptions made about
people who voted to leave as well.
About it being predominantly a racist
anti-immigration xenophobic vote.
And I think that's been very misguided very ill though out.
And motivated by the fear that's been generated
quite deliberately by those who wanted us to stay in.
Now the reason why it's almost
it's badly motivated but it's
more importantly it's incorrect and that's
the important thing really is it's just plain wrong.
There are not 17 and a half million racists in Britain.
Just isn't true.
Everyone's frightened, afraid of not haven't control
and not many people coming into the UK.
And it's making a big difference.
It's hitting the NHS.
It's hitting even just around here the dentists
and everything we can't get in
because if we can't cope with the influx of people.
It's a very small country with a quite a large population
and the resources are just being stretched too much.
It's all about territorial.
It's the same with animals isn't it?
If a dog is in its garden another dog
comes into the garden it's invading its territory.
It's the same kind of deal I think.
People are a bit afraid of it.
I must admit I'd be afraid of that myself, being invaded.
In the Northeast I'm from a white
working class estate in the West End of Newcastle.
And everybody that lives there is still white I would argue.
And after the election I went and had a pint with my dad
in the working men's club and had a conversation there.
Nearly all voted to leave.
Why did you vote to leave?
Well because of all the immigrants coming here
taking our jobs and our houses.
And I said to them well what immigrant do you know?
I don't know any.
So who do has lost their house
or their job to an immigrant?
Well I don't know anyone.
Right okay so why have you lost your job?
Well because the place shut down.
Why did the place shut down?
Because of the recession.
What caused the recession?
Bankers.
Alright so it's bankers and not migrants
then that's caused this problem.
So I don't think it's a difficult argument
to have with working class communities.
Now let's just say everyone in the EU out you go.
So that'd be two million jobs free.
Now the agencies take a lot of the money.
they pay the minimum wage and take
a huge amount of that person's money.
But British people won't put up with it.
So the agency has a choice.
I go into an agency and I say let's say in two years time
once that 50, paper 50 or article 50's been done
and I go to an agency and I say
I'm interested in that job in the window.
And they say okay well it's only paying the minimum wage.
You say nah I want eight quid an hour.
Well we can't pay that.
I say okay go and get a Polish person.
Oh shit you can't they're not here anymore.
They've all gone back.
With things like immigration and influx of
people from Europe they probably are scared
that their home area where there isn't many immigrants
will become like London losing
its country's identity as it were because
let's be honest London is not an English town.
London is a bit of a paradox.
London has some exceedingly wealthy people
living almost right across the street
from some exceedingly poor.
When I go to London I don't meet many Londoners anymore.
And that's a big shame and that's
also another reason for Brexit I think
that people will want Britain to stay Britain
to stay England they don't want it to
become an amalgamation of the rest of Europe
where we are rightly very proud of the things that are here.
We're very lucky where we are.
In Northumberland it's highly unlikely that
there's gonna be a terrorist attack up here.
But it has got a massive effect on people.
There was a lady that wouldn't,
she won't get on an airplane anymore.
So she goes on holiday she goes on a bus.
I think it's been bubbling up for
a long long time for many years since
the day when I was about 10 or 11 and the 9/11 happened.
Yeah the refugees are not all refugees we're seeing that
if they were all refugees you would have this
I would think you would have women, children, and men.
You see him them not so much children
but women and man you would have equal amounts.
The thought is we've seen the videos.
It's all males.
I would say in 30 not all but the vast majority of them.
And they aren't refugees.
[Interviewer] What are they?
They're the part of this,
I think they're a part of this Isis plan for to get
a strong foothold in Europe and then enter the UK.
And that's been proven.
I think growing up in Northern Ireland
made me realize that
terrorism isn't something that brown people do exclusively.
That white people are also capable of terrorism.
I think that's important for the
rest of the world to realize.
It made me understand how communities
can be completely divided.
And why the state has an interest in dividing communities.
And how the division of different groups
of people actually helps the state
and a way the state encourages that.
The important thing to remember is that
I don't have a political degree and neither does
millions of people that voted.
It's all about public opinion.
So if you can sway that by making people feel like they're
benefiting something or actually making it change
then it doesn't matter what they vote for
as long as they feel like they're making a difference.
Last week there is a poll taken that said
that 33% of people feel the Brexit is the most important
issue facing government over the next three years.
57% of people think it's the NHS.
And that should tell you something as well
about what using the NHS to manipulate
people during a referendum campaign,
what sort of impact that that would have.
And it's people's number one concern
and ironically it is probably not going to be addressed
in the next 10 years if we continue with
the plan to leave the European Union because government
somebody won't have time for any other priority.
As a young person who supported UKIP who supports UKIP
and who voted for Brexit in the referendum I feel that
I am not part of the norm for young people because
I don't listen to everything that the media tells me.
I've learnt to be skeptical about what the media says.
That pretty much includes all aspects of media
whether that be the Sun newspaper,
The Independent, The Guardian, Daily Mail.
And I came to the conclusion that I came to
because I did my own research.
I looked at the UK policies.
I didn't just judged by what the headlines
were saying about UKIP because at the end of the day
the media is very sensationalist and it's designed
to get to build reactions out of people.
When you're part of the EU any countries joining the EU
then you have to to allow these people in.
So on the pipeline was gonna be Turkey, Macedonia, Croatia.
I mean so how many people can you take?
How many jobs is there in this country?
How is the benefits and stuff like that?
Are they taking our benefits?
Are they taking our jobs?
If they're born in Britain and be of British
parent parentage yes they've got a right to be here.
They've got a right to claim benefits.
But they also should have a right to the jobs.
Now they can't have the jobs if other people
from other other countries have taken them jobs.
So basically that's the only way
the open borders actually have any
ruling on who gets jobs.
Because if you got a load of foreigners
coming in the country and taking all the jobs
no job is left for the British.
Where does it leave the British people?
So I have friends that
have been out of work for some time
or were out of work for some time.
And they'd always refused to work in a factory
or a sandwich packing plant or in a field
because they feel like it's the last type
because there's nowhere to go from that.
You can't go up and you can't gain qualifications
or you might not find a better place.
So they actively remain unemployed
in search of something better.
And then I have Eastern European friends
which has taken these jobs and then going back
to my first friends they said that they can't get a job
because that job in the field or a packing plant
might have been taken by an Eastern European.
It'd be great to give everybody a job wouldn't it?
Give them self self worth to be
able to make their own money?
Maybe that's what they think about
when they think about coming to England.
Which is a dream isn't it hope?
What kept them people alive on those boats
that come across the channel in grease dying in the sea?
That bitter hope.
And let's give it to them if that's what they want.
You couldn't deny that to anyone could you?
When you say there aren't any jobs anymore
It's not a matter of there aren't any jobs.
There isn't any pay.
And the reason there isn't any pay is because
the greed of the upper echelons, the elite.
The elite want to make more and more
and more and more money and the only way,
normally nine times out of 10 if you go back in history
and study this you'll find that in nine cases out of 10
the only way this is ever solved is
by a catastrophic world war.
I feel like there is still a lot of hope in the world
because everyday people are able to connect with each other
in profound meaningful ways that before
we're only the preserve of the elite and major corporations.
Like now we can all network.
And myself as an artist, as a poet
I can find people all over the world
and I can connect with them and I can have
places to work and perform and there is a wonderful freedom
that I have that my ancestors never had.
And I feel incredibly lucky to be alive now
as a lesbian female Northern Irish person from a rural area.
Before there would be no possibility
of being able to exercise freedom within any of those roles.
So I actually feel really lucky to be alive right now
as opposed to any other any other time.
I guess maybe if you were like
a white heterosexual English man
this is maybe like a scary time to be alive
because other people are doing things
and that might be threatening for them.
But for me like it's great to be live now.
And I feel like all this fear mongering
is just a way to try and encourage people
to buy more stuff that they don't need.
Are we clear?
We're clear?
Donald Trump is the President of the United States.
The reason I think it seems that it is white
straight possibly also working class men
who are critical of identity politics
or political correctness is because
they are the one identity group that is not
held to be necessary of any assistance.
They're not viewed as disadvantaged and in fact
they're quite commonly deemed to be the oppressor.
And I think if you are with relation to Brexit
if you look at what's happened in America
I think this plays a massive part
in explaining what's going on.
White working class male people
have started playing the identity politics game.
They've realized that although they may have
very different agendas as a group they can,
they can they must work together to
form a coherent identity because this is how
the other side is playing the game.
The world's changed so much since my youth even.
People used to be proud to be British.
They fought world wars to be British.
We had an empire that more or less ruled the world.
Now there's no empire.
There's no jobs.
We're no longer a strong nation.
So I can't say in the future
what the future holds for the country.
What unites people in Britain my experience is that
everybody wants Britain to be back
to being mighty to being great again.
And I think we've had like the last 10, 11 years
we've just kind of come out of a recession.
It's been really hard.
Granted a lot of people have been hit hard.
In fact I don't really think other than
the ultimate uber rich I don't think there's anybody
that hasn't sort of had a knock in the last 10 years.
And I think that's great that we're all united
and want in the the nation to be awesome again.
And I think what divides people is how
we're going to be awesome again.
There was a little bit inside me that thought
what if I'm wrong but my heart told me we've got to get out.
We can manage we're not a stupid nation.
We're a brave race of people and we can
think for ourselves and by God we will.
I mean Britain was the biggest country in the world.
They dominated the world.
Yeah I guess it's coming back to haunt us now
because obviously we probably raped and pillaged
most countries all over the world
and now they want a bit, a piece of us back.
But that's not the point.
The point is is that we're still this little country
in the middle of the whatever the Atlantic Ocean
and we deserve to be this great nation
that why we're called Great Britain
because we are this great nation.
And we don't want to give it up so easily.
Whoever had the biggest army
that's who decided who owned the land.
Invaders were a country of conquerors.
I think we've been invaded I don't know
how many times but were a country of conquerors.
It was might who decided who owns this land.
I suspect hundreds and hundreds of years ago when
the Percy family took over the parish
around here which is a fairly big parish they stole it.
They murdered and thieved and stole it simple as that.
I'm not too sure that it'll happen again but it may.
It may be a peasant uprising. [laughing]
But what I'd like to say about what Gary said before
about when we used to rule the world
what people like me and Gary should remember is
in them days the working class
didn't get a slice of that either.
We were still treated as badly as
we will be if we rule the world again.
Me I think class is relevant.
I don't think we can all be the same.
Or we'd finish up like like China for instance.
Communism, all one level, everybody the same
and socialism and I don't think that would work.
You need someone with brains I should think at the top.
The gap between the rich and the poor now
is the greatest that's ever been in history.
Now you don't need to do anything to make money.
If you inherit money you will actually make more money
by doing nothing then you will by working.
I think the long term future of Northern Ireland
lies with the Republic as opposed to
a part of the United Kingdom.
That's obviously gonna be a very
another sort of minefield whenever that happens but
I think no, I think Britain,
I've never thought Britain was a great country.
I think it's been throughout its history been an aggressor.
I think now it's
smaller and weaker than it ever has been.
And I look forward to Scotland leaving them.
I look forward to Northern Ireland leaving it.
And once that does happen my attitude
would be to hell with Britain.
You're proud, proud to be British.
Everyone looks at the British
and how would they solve this problem?
It's about passion we've got a lot
of passion in the UK and Britain.
And everything we do we do full hearted.
I'm a Patriot because I grew up
loving and respecting my country.
I love the Queen.
I love our culture.
I love our location.
And it's the place where I've lived since I was born.
I've always loved that.
I don't believe the country's influenced me in my life
possibly just from me own, took me own life
in me own hands and made me own destiny.
And problems are always things like national identity
Those are the problems.
Governments are the problems because they're
the only ones who are pushing this concept
of a national identity.
I mean you're working class might.
People working might say yeah this is what
it means to be British, this is what it means to be British.
It's just like you're just trying to grab on
to a collective identity because you're fucking alone.
Because you're busy all the time you've got nothing.
There's no hope it's just constant revolving
work, work, work, family blah blah blah.
Kind of irresponsible to be honest.
In Britain we feel like we're better
I suppose that's what it's always been.
I consider myself to be European.
I consider myself to be part of the continent of Europe.
Not many people share this view.
I don't know why people are proud to be British.
You cannot be proud of something that you haven't done.
I personally struggle with ideas of national identity.
I'm from Wales but I wouldn't necessarily say that I'm Welsh
because when you say either English, Welsh,
Scottish, Irish, whatever there's
a lot of imagery that's codified into that.
As I like to say in a bit of a jokey fashion
I don't care about rugby so clearly I'm not all that Welsh.
I'm a like many Welsh Welshman a rugby fan
and the song that symbolizes I think my favorite rugby team
the team which is known throughout the world as having
beaten the All Blacks namely The Llanelli Scarlets.
And they're known as The Boys of Sospan.
And there is a song which is known as
[speaking in foreign language] and it goes like this.
[singing in foreign language]
England's my home country.
If you go to any other foreign country you'll see
their flags flying all the time.
Now in England you're a racist if you fly you're own flag.
I think English is, and I'm not,
English is that color.
British can be any color you want.
You cannot say that.
I have nothing to do with that last statement.
To feel unwelcome here after giving so much
to being here, being part of it
feeling it's a part of me, because that's the main
because I feel I belong I feel like I'm part of it.
Then all of a sudden to have that taken
away from you is a feeling of not belonging
not having a place of being alienated.
It's marginalizing a huge amount of people
that are all of a sudden saying that
you aren't actually supposed to be here.
Where are we supposed to be?
Simply because of our ancestry that
all of a sudden we don't belong.
Simply because of the color of our skin
that all of a sudden we don't belong it doesn't make sense.
Women, specifically women, specifically Muslim women
who wear the hijab who wear the niqab who wear the burkas
they've been targeted as vulnerable people.
And as a Muslim woman sometimes
I wear hijab sometimes I don't and for my children
for my daughters I have two daughters.
I feel desperately unsafe,
desperately unhappy.
I think we've always had a problem
of racism in this society but I think
because of the press and the way that politicians
talked about issues of race and migration
during the election campaign it began to legitimize
public racism on a scale that we haven't seen for a while.
So you can't deny it because we've seen a massive
increase in hate crimes since the election results.
So it's obviously done something.
I don't think it's that we suddenly just
become more racist think it's always been there
but people now have a legitimate reason
to behave and talk the way that they probably
previously felt was unacceptable.
Until perhaps even five years ago
it was very easy to see very distinct
and concrete comparisons between the industrial
Northern England and the Central Belt of Scotland.
They had very similar cultures
and cultures suffering from the decline of industrialization
cultures borderline decimated by conservative policy
that ruined job prospects and income for so many people.
However there is now in 2016 one
crucial difference between those two areas.
In 2014 in Scotland citizens went through
a huge constitutional debate for the independence referendum
and during that time we were pushed
and we found ourselves hosting
the most incredible discussions about politics.
So instead of saying what party you voted for
or what politician will you support this time?
We were asking questions like what currency should we have?
What rules makes a society just?
We were starting from the bottom up
and as a result I think Scotland
although the vote didn't turn out the way
I'd hoped it would and had a political makeover if you like
whereby citizens became engaged on an unprecedented level
and I would argue we've got one of the most sophisticated
and clued in electorate that's going at the moment.
I live in a mining, or should I say
an ex-mining town in County Durham, place called Horden.
Used to be the biggest,
used to have the biggest coal mine in Europe.
The industries of Elham it was base around
the steelworks so the area where we are now
would have once been the steelworks.
It closed down I think 60's or 70's maybe
and now this is an industrial estate
and there's lots of different industries here now.
Obviously you can see there's containers.
The building Port of Salford just down the road so
that's going to bring a lot of
new industry and new work here
with shipping containers that sort of thing.
In the past there was margarine works,
dye works, salt works, match works
but most of that's gone now and it's kind of like
more like head offices and things like that.
The Tory government actually closed
the coal mines, they close to shipyards.
They've just gotten rid of the steel industry.
So basically there's no heavy industries.
Britain was always run on heavy industries
and that's why it was so self sufficient.
Other countries used to rely on us.
Now we rely on other countries.
You heard a lot talk about globalization
and it's been going on for many many years
that the world's got closer and closer.
And in the beginning it was great.
We all had cheap products and we all thought
it is wonderful trainers have never been so cheap,
and clothes have never been so cheap.
It's brought inflation down, it's been a good thing.
Globalization has been a good thing and well I think
we've got to the point where now it's starting affect,
it's starting to affect people on the ground
within the countries more particularly
probably the wealthier countries.
The standard of living is dropping and I think we're seeing,
I think we need to get to the root
of what problems we're seeing and
how we're going to deal with it.
I'd hate to be leaving school now.
'Cause you can't get a job.
When we left school Gary's five six years younger than me.
We could just walk into jobs.
Left school, I left school with no qualifications at fifteen
and straight into an engineering apprenticeship.
You can't do that now.
You've got to stay in school till you're 18
then you go to university get a silly degree.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying everyone who goes to university
gets a silly degree but there are silly degrees out there.
And then people's waste so much of their lives
and then they can't get a job.
No that's right.
Not everybody leaves university these days and gets a job
and not everybody just falls into luck
just that easily anymore especially for me.
I think it's been a bit of a wake up.
I'm the youngest of four and it's been a wake up call
with me that it's not just been that easy for me
in the economy that I came out of university
just to make a success of myself.
There's not that many opportunities
and to be quite honest I would have been better off
not having gone to university and of studying a vocation.
In my opinion I would have got a lot further.
The younger generation today don't seem to be as
into owning a home as maybe my parents generation where.
It was the norm it's what you did.
You bought a house you got married you had a kid.
I think the younger generation are kind of
having to accept that they're gonna have to rent.
People live with the parents still a lot later these days
which is a bit of a shame really that
they can't get out on their own
because rent is even ridiculously high.
People struggle to rent.
And again like there's no social housing so
if you can't afford to rent and you can't afford to buy
and there's no council houses I mean where do you live?
There's been a lot of cuts and we've seen it in our jobs.
There's people losing their jobs
and council jobs and stuff like that but
people's gotta lose their jobs for the country
to go forward because they've got to save money
and to be honest that's life.
If you lose your job you've got to go find another one.
There's work out there.
We go back to the days when they was saying
there's no work there's no work but there's always been work
if you want to go find a job there's a job there.
Jobs are freedom.
Jobs are also self esteem.
One of the big problems in this area
and with every area of unemployment is people who are
emotionally downtrodden.
When you don't have a job you don't have purpose.
Having purpose I consider is just
as important as having an income.
I visited a hen, an egg operation in Scotland last year.
And it produces a million and a quarter eggs a day.
And it was a huge packing station manned by robots.
Not many people and very efficient.
So it'll carry on and leave us old codgers behind.
As a taxi driver in regards to to growth of technology
I'm not worried about a self driving car
otherwise known as a pilotless car.
People climb into a taxi be it
a hackney carriage or a private higher car
to drive home with someone that knows the roads
someone that's friendly, talkative.
We take home after a night out
vulnerable young ladies who are drunk.
We ensure they get through the door that they're safe.
An automated car can't do that.
It's a machine it has no emotion
it doesn't think that extra mile that a human can think.
While an automated car is good for delivering parcels
using an arm drop it outside the door
it fails at being able to knock on the door
to let you know the parcel's there.
I don't believe and their doom mongering
that we're going to be replaced by robots
and no one's gonna have a job anymore.
But maybe this technology can mean that we can move towards
a society where we only work three or four days a week.
And people have more social time.
But that means that wages are going to have to go up
so people can afford to live on working four days a week.
And you see some of those experiments
happening across Europe you see it in
some of the Scandinavian countries
people having a citizen's wage.
So I'm not scared of technology.
I think there's some real benefits to be had
in the uses and development of technology
so long as it's utilized to support people
rather than to just make money.
I think it's so sad that we're getting rid
of people to give those jobs to robots.
'Cause in the 50's we got people over from
the West Indies to do the jobs that we couldn't.
We couldn't fill the jobs in the NHS
without these people being brought over
so to now render their children unemployed.
I mean what's the future if we don't give young people jobs?
They need to be working otherwise they're
just gonna be rampaging the streets
as some of them are doing at the moment.
The robots will do everything.
We'll have robots that can make the robots.
So then what happens?
People might as well be extinct.
The whole world might as well just lie down and die.
Give North Korea the the power and just
let them press the button and blow the bloody world up.
I think the right people are right to think
that we're heading towards the end.
I think it could be eminently close.
It could be eminently within the next couple of decades.
But I could give you strong evidence
that's biblical evidence that it could be 300 years away.
But it's not centuries and centuries away.
There is very good reason for believing
that we're getting to that critical mass time.
Call it a biblical prophecy.
I don't want us to be part of the 10 nations
that are going to rise out of federal Europe.
By leaving we'll avoid that.
Whether you believe biblical prophecy or not check it out.
It's been 100% accurate so far.
The future?
No reason to doubt that it won't come to pass.
But until these circumstances fall into place
nothing is gonna happen.
I don't think the country will ever
come back to its former glories because
especially in the area where I live because
there's not enough investment there's not enough facilities.
There's basically just nothing.
You've got one third of the country
people in the country live in the Southeast of the country.
And that's where everything,
all the work and everything is towards.
Brexit doesn't matter 'cause we've got nothing anyhow.
[monastic chanting]
When you've lost Democratic control
you can blame it on the experts.
But it's not the experts who created the policies that's
basically the business world and the corporate sector.
What's happening is opposition to policies.
The policies are imposed by self appointed experts.
So opposition to the policies may take the form
of opposition to expertise but that's not what it is.
In a democratic society not everybody becomes an expert.
[Woman] One feature of our current condition
is that we have on the one hand managed
to generate truly extraordinary complexities,
complexities that demand multiple systems of knowledge.
In all of that also lie extraordinary capacities
to generate brutalities that are simple.
Neoliberalism is the ideal
hegemonic ideology of globalization.
It's basically saying we must liberalize
all markets, make them open markets.
We must commodify everything.
That means make them all subject to market forces
and market prices turning the commons
into part of the market society
and most importantly privatize everything.
So privatize the health service.
Privatize your education system.
Privatize the occupational life.
Privatize all public services.
And that agenda means they also are very hostile
to all institutions that stand against the market.
Trades Unions, collective bargaining,
NGO's, form of institutions,
the education system as an independent entity.
And they've been dismantling those and weakening those
systematically for the past 30 years.
A new liberalism as a system worked for some time
but it's now collapsed and since 2008 effectively
what we've seen is government's trying
reinstate neoliberalism through austerity.
But this has failed as well.
We haven't seen a return to economic growth.
We're continuing to see wages stagnate.
We're continuing to see income inequality rise.
And we're continuing to see people suffer.
I think Brexit if anything is
a reaction against neoliberalism.
Now we don't have anything to replace it yet.
And I think this is why today feels so chaotic at the moment
effectively we don't have a system that will yet
replace neoliberalism even as we start to see
attempts by the right through Donald Trump, Theresa May
to assert some sort of authoritarian post liberal order.
Whether or not this will be successful is yet to be seen.
What's wrong with neoliberal democracy is
first of all that it undermines democracy.
That's explicit when you introduce privatization,
marketization and so on that's taking decisions
away from people and placing them
in the hands of private power.
That in itself is anti democratic and it also
turns out to be harmful to much of the population.
Joseph Stiglitz a Noble Laureate in Economics
later Chief Economist for the World Bank
warned against what he called following
the religion that markets know best.
They may know best about the price of shoes
but there's a lot of things they don't know best about.
And that's been demonstrated
and people are suffering from it.
Bernie Sanders talked about a political revolution
but if you look at his policies
they wouldn't have surprised to Dwight Eisenhower.
Well these are signs of how far everything
is shifted to the right during the neoliberal period.
Let's be honest.
We have newspapers owned by ex-Soviet spies,
mainstream newspaper in Britain.
We have billionaire plutocrats dominating our media.
No government in Britain has won since 1974
without the active support of Rupert Murdoch, no government.
And Rupert Murdoch backed Brexit
and he got his Sun newspaper and Sky and others
to come out in favor of Brexit peddling many of the lies
that the Brexit campaigners were putting out.
And he won.
He was on the winning side as always in British politics.
And Rupert Murdoch was asked by
the press why he supported Brexit?
Very revealing answer.
He must be getting old.
His answer was
because when I go to Downing Street they do as I tell them.
When I go to Brussels no one takes any notice.
The shocking thing about this neoliberal moment
where we see racism on the rise and so openly expressed
is that I would have never expected to see
far right politicians given the platform that they have.
On television we see Nigel Farage for you UKIP
sitting there on the same platform as
the bona fide traditional political parties.
We see all across Europe the far right
and whether it's Wilders or Le Pen
having an open platform to say racist things
and then claim what I'm saying is the truth,
what I'm saying is I'm honest.
They're saying it isn't racist to be racist.
By having this huge scapegoating
when capitalism is in its point of crisis
this project now needs to find somebody
and we use the word scapegoating
and it might seem like a cliche but it is so evident
that you cannot believe it's actually
happening in front of your eyes.
[calm music]
What does a plastic bottle water have in common
with a migrant arriving at the shores of Europe?
Well the water bottle, that water comes from far away.
Big complex corporate arrangements were made for us to get
that little bottle of plastic with water in it.
It's Coca Cola, it's Nestle, and about 20 other bottlers.
They go in they often buy or simply grab
a huge piece of land and they begin to extract the water.
The water was extracted from a large piece of land
that used to be the land that produced a livelihood
and good nice fresh vegetables for small communities
and small growers small farmers.
They have lost their habitats because we got our water.
Think of the millions and millions of people
who are expelled by those processes.
So at our borders we get our plastic bottle of water
and we get our migrants, we never see the connection.
So the question of Brexit was
the question of Britishness in a sense.
And at the same time the question of foreignness.
What is a foreign, who is a foreign, and what is
the relationship we have to have with the foreign?
The idea of Brexit was not that the UK was to leave Europe
but it was the Europe had to leave the UK.
So it's not about the UK coming out of Europe
but it's about expelling Europe from the UK.
Now what is Europe?
Well in the perspective of Brexit as in the perspective of
the majority of the people that voted for Brexit
Europe was this strange hybrid.
Europe was the bureaucratic elites the fat cats in Brussels.
And at the same time it was the kind of dirty immigrants.
So it's a strange combination of this
cosmopolitan extravagant elitist world
and it's dirty dangerous criminal underworld.
We have had two major migrant subjects, the refugee
and there is an international law that allows us
to recognize the refugee when she stands at our borders.
And then we have the immigrant.
the immigrant is a strong subject.
It's extraordinary actually when you think about it
how few people become immigrants
given a world with such unequal chances.
When she appears at our borders there is national law
which is very messy law by the way.
But there is law that recognizes her.
I see in today's epoch really just the last five
maybe at most in certain areas 10 years
a third subject who is invisible to the eye of the law.
And one very sort of brief and a bit exaggerated
way of putting it is she's the refugee
of a certain mode of economic development.
Land grabs, mining, et cetera et cetera.
In the measures that countries use to measure
how their economy is doing when a plantation
when a mine replaces millions of small holders
of small agricultural people that reads as a positive.
It shows as GDP per capita growth.
It does not measure the fact of these millions
who are expelled who then reappear at the edges of Europe.
So we are dealing with a very complex cycle
that connects the destruction of the environment
which produces a loss of habitat.
The fact that how we measure that destruction
of the habitats, we measure it as a positive.
And the invisibility of this third emergent subject
that is the subject of our modernity, this modernity.
[calm music]
[waves crashing]
It's often lamented that there aren't enough jobs.
Of course this is ironic as in the fact that
there aren't enough jobs should be a good sign.
As in if jobs are supposed to be
activities that we do to cater for people's needs.
And needs are of course these horrible
thing that we have to get rid of.
We have this pressing urging need
and what we want to do is to get rid of it.
Like we are thirsty we drink.
Then the fact that there aren't enough jobs
means that there aren't enough
unsatisfied needs that we need to satisfy.
So logically you would say it is a good thing.
It becomes a bad thing when not having enough jobs
becomes not having enough income.
The reason why there aren't enough jobs has to do with
transformations in the productive
systems the increasing automation.
Over the last 100 years there was this
continuous discussion about the fact that automation
would reduce working hours in a good way.
It would require us to work less and less and less.
In fact that has not happened.
We work now more than we used to work before.
The working year of a medieval peasant was actually less
full than the working year of a collar worker today.
So often times when we think about automation
we think about big industrial robots on the assembly line.
But actually the self driving car
is a better model for automation today.
The self driving car, little is 10 years ago
people were confidently predicting
that it was basically impossible.
We would never have a self driving car.
Now obviously that's not the case.
the important part about this is that
there are millions of people working in driving jobs.
Whether it be truck drivers or delivery drivers
or taxi drivers if you look at America about 80%
of the states truck driving is the most popular job.
So this is a huge huge job sector
which is going to be impacted by a very
large amount by this wave of automation.
So I think a lot of the images of future
that are offered today oftentimes rely upon the past.
When we look to mainstream social democratic parties
when we look to trade unions, when we look to what
a lot of social movements are offering the idea of
the future that they offer is simply 1960's capitalism.
It's Keynesian it's the welfare state and social democracy
but this isn't actually an image of the future
so much as an image of a nostalgic past.
I think a lot of the slogans around making
America great again or returning the great to Great Britain
a lot of these are highly racialized slogans which
actually have an image of a very white sort of country.
And what they want in fact it's not necessarily
a return to some previous period of glory
but instead they want to return to what
they see as being their white country.
But I think it's really important to talk about
the distinctions amongst whiteness.
Because there's the white working class
and then there's the white middle class
and then there's the elite and the super elite
and each one embodies and holds a different form of power.
So even though the skin color may seem the same
they are absolutely situated in
a different part of the social structure.
And how they relate to each other
is important to understanding the dynamics of Brexit
because actually you have the empowered elite
and the middle classes voting to remain.
And you have the working class
and the abject poor and even within that
some black working class voting to leave.
And they feel they want their sovereignty back.
They want a love of the nation.
They want to reassert their Britishness, all the things
that actually smooth the wheels for the political elite.
Because nationalism is the endgame of capitalism.
It is the structure of the state that allows the elite
to gain wealth and status and assert a certain kind
of white privilege over the white working class.
And there you have within this heady mixture
you have the black working class and the migrant groups
as the kind of cog in the wheel
that links the white working class to the elite.
Because by hating and despising the migrant
you're not looking at the people that are truly
oppressing you and taking away your benefits
and removing your industrial base
so that you are no longer employed
and not building any houses for the working class.
No you're not looking at that.
You're looking at your neighbor who is black and saying
get out of here which is what happened.
The moment the Brexit vote happened
a rise of racism and the verbal abuse
that happened on the streets was horrendous.
I mean it happened to me.
I was walking down the street the day after Brexit
and an elderly white man told me to go back home.
This is my home I am black and British.
So we have a sense in which the idea
that all white bodies are the same
is something that we need to disentangle
because different meanings can stick to different bodies.
[ominous music]
What I find so almost harrowing
about the current condition is how much of it is invisible.
Brexit is partly a cry of help.
It's a cry, there's pain in the success of Brexit.
It represents pain.
And that is the people who were left behind.
And to put the burden of Brexit
on a sort of mindless nationalism
of those types of workers and families and cities
that have lost so much ground because of the financializing,
the corporatizing, and the internationalizing
of our national economies that is truly unfair.
More importantly perhaps that doesn't get us anywhere.
Translation and subtitles by PEPPER & LALASPAIN *** SONG LIVES FOR EVER ***