Will Brehm 0:41
Susan Robertson, welcome back to FreshEd.

Susan Robertson 0:44
Thank you, Will. Very nice to be back here. Although what we’re going to be talking about, I’m not sure really, that was what I anticipated my return might be about.

Will Brehm 0:54
I know. It’s been a crazy last few days watching what’s been unfolding in Britain and thank you so much for just being able to join the show last minute. To just try and unpack -what is going on with the Brexit?

Susan Robertson 1:13
What’s going -well, it’s gone on now, Will, Thursday night? Well, for the last three, four, five months, there’s been a daily campaign around either what’s called “remain” or “Brexit”. Now, fundamentally remain here means does the UK remain in Europe. The regional agreement that really got underway in the post-war period. So, this is a 40-year project of being part of Europe and an expanding Europe, many countries adding themselves in as part of a free market. And in that post-war period, the view always was that actually countries that traded with each other didn’t fight with each other. So, that’s “remain” in that kind of arrangement of which education, freer movement of people and so on. And so, education is very tied up in this. Brexit essentially means exit. And here, this would actually be the camp of the so-called Eurosceptics. This idea that giving some of your sovereignty to regional bodies in some way actually means that somehow you -and you do actually- you lose some degree of sovereignty. But the question of the pluses and minuses about what you gain and what you lose are actually really what the debate is about. So, four months of campaigning, quite a lot of huge amounts of rhetoric, in fact, it was kind of a show where you went to an even further kind of register of the terrible things, or the fantastic things that would happen if you remained or you exited. But I think on Thursday, we voted and on Thursday night, we all went to bed thinking it would be close. But if you spoke to every single person that I encountered and perhaps, let’s just remind ourselves, I’m encountering middle-class people in my environment. The words were literally, “I’m shocked”, is two words that everyone kept on saying, “I’m shocked”. And the shock essentially really is that what has happened has been that the UK has voted in a referendum by 52% voting to leave, and 48% which is now a significant margin, voting to remain and perhaps well if we can kind of say, well, okay, we can look at that and we can try and get a sense of what that means. There are some very paradoxical things. So, in the main, Scotland voted to remain. And this will be very interesting for thinking about what happens to Scotland wanting to actually bail out completely themselves. The biggest vote for exiting came from pretty much the working classes. And you’ll see valley areas in Wales. Many of these areas receiving European structural funds, but they voted to exit. In the north of England again, the vote was to exit. Big cities like London, regions like Scotland. cities like mine, actually a fairly you know green voting city voted to remain. And if we try and understand what that means, fundamentally it does actually say something about some very deep symptoms in the country around feeling disenfranchised from politics more generally and from both the political and the economic classes. So, we’ve got that one there. What is also interesting is that young people did go out registered. At one point so many young people registering that the website went down. But 75% of 18-to-24-year olds, compared to 40% of over 65-year olds, voted to remain. And here now, what you have is families actually split. The older members of the family voting to exit, the younger members voting to remain, and younger people actually saying, not only have we been living with you know very bad economic and political decisions that the older generation have put upon us. But this younger generation now, who wanted to remain, who see remaining in Europe as creating more space for opportunity and so on -workwise, education wise, and so on- that they actually feel that they have been shortchanged by the economic, political and the older generation. So, this is a kind of triple jeopardy from their point of view.

Will Brehm 6:38
So, how would you explain some of these generational differences, these demographic differences, the age differences, like what are some of the underlying causes that created a vote to be split in such a way?

Susan Robertson 6:56
Well, what I would say, most pundits who are kind of looking at the post-election period now are actually -I mean, perhaps we could even go to the United States. You know, Bernie Sanders, he’s well supported by a younger generation. They want a different politics. Okay. So, on the one hand, the young people, you know, see that different politics is actually perhaps being mediated by a more cosmopolitan kind of politics, you know, more active politics. For that older generation, essentially working-class families who have lost out in the period that we could describe as neoliberal. It’s more than any period for decades and decades have we seen rising inequalities, the 1%, the 99% or the 1% of the 10%, in relation to that remaining either 99% or the 90%. So, quite systematic exclusion, loss of living standards, which we can see amongst the working classes. In all the races that we now say that you’ve got to, you know, operate in the education race, in the social mobility race, it’s that class that’s lost out. I mean, we can see this in 2014 Thomas Piketty was one of many writers, but also his book was one of many books that came out looking at the deep, deep consequences of not just decades of restructuring that have privileged a particular class. You know, a political class that’s actually enabled an economic elite to not pay taxes, to put their money into tax havens, to not invest in decent jobs and so on, you know, outsourced a lot of that work that. So, this is that kind of vote. Saskia Sassen talks about this as “forms of expulsion” and Thursday night was a very interesting example of talking back and an expulsion of which -from Europe a regional agreement- the consequences particularly for education, we can begin to talk about them. But the longer-term consequences, if there’s no clawing back of a position, I think will result in paradoxically, even further inequalities amongst the different social classes.

Will Brehm 9:45
So, can you go into that? What sort of educational effects is the Brexit going to have with the EU having so much student mobility, having a lot of the research funding from the European Commission goes into the UK. So, what sort of effects do you see happening?

Susan Robertson 10:06
Well, the university sector particularly, or the higher education sector, particularly, this is catastrophic. It puts about 12% of the budget into the EU, but in the university sector it takes that about 15%. So, the university sector makes huge amounts of money. Now that 15% would probably largely be research money, but I could just give you some big figures that tell you quite what the headache actually feels like. So, universities more generally generate something like 73 billion for the UK economy. So, it’s a very big income generator, of which 3.7 billion -this is the figures that we’re looking at- are generated by student from EU countries who come to the UK to study. And they study in undergraduate and graduate courses. In graduate courses, they’re actually paying a slightly higher amount of money [compared] to local students. And in the case of undergraduate students, they access the student loan book, but they actually enroll in large numbers in undergraduate programs. So, that’s very significant. And if we say that, in fact, it will be more difficult for those students because they’re protected by EU law to be able to come here to access the student loan book, and so on and under different conditions to international students. If they’re to find other places to go, you know, Germany is increased its numbers of students being taken into Germany fairly significantly. So, there are competitor countries across Europe. Not only does it mean that they don’t turn up and they don’t make our universities much more interesting cosmopolitan places but that essentially will result in job cuts across the university sector. And they’re talking about something close to, you know, 400,000 jobs that support lecturers, administrators, and so on. So, this is really significant. As the research funding in the UK has become much more problematic because of austerity and very large amounts of money have come out of the higher education sector. Many of us have looked to Europe to get grants and we’re typically very successful in getting those grants and leading big research teams and so. And then perhaps I might just say this Will, it’s not just a money thing. And working in research teams, working with students that come into your classes. What this does actually, it does break down, what some people do regard as the scourge of kind of nationalisms which scholars like Habermas have regarded the EU project as potentially being able to undermine that nationalisms led in the Second World War period to fascisms and so on. And that push to having a more cosmopolitan attitude to be able to understand different cultures, the other and so on. That’s the positive side. I mean, there’s the money side of course and economic side, but there’s been to some extent, a positive cultural side and that hand that revealed itself and I do understand where it comes from, although we must absolutely deal with that. That sense of disenfranchisement. But to retract back into this kind of excessive not just nationalisms, but racisms. So, on the streets on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, really very nasty things beginning to happen. You know, individuals being singled out in supermarkets, and you know, “Are you Polish? If you are just going back home, we’ve voted you out.” Now that can’t be good for any society to have that as an outcome.

Will Brehm 14:29
Are there any upsides to this Brexit vote?

Susan Robertson 14:34
I think the upside is to be a wakeup call that the political classes, you know, that sense of being removed, you know, that you could actually ride roughshod over the needs of families, a sense of being disenfranchised, and so on. So, the upside, I think, is to be absolutely a wakeup call. I think the -even one of the key people who ran the Brexit campaign, Boris Johnson has actually, I think, as we understand it been quite shocked at the outcome. He didn’t expect that. It was some calculated political move, maneuvering on his side. And already there’s some retraction back into, “Well, that’s not really what we meant,” and so on. So, there’s been a kind of a shake up and potentially a shaking out. But let’s just hope that we can actually use this space now productively to really focus attention on what the outcomes have actually been for several decades of very nasty economic policies, and 2008 austerity policies that actually have been really very negative policies for populations. You know, perhaps the upside is, you know, Americans might take notice and really make a decision not to vote in … Trump who’s doing the same kind of thing. Shaking the race card around and you know, “We don’t want these other people. We don’t want them here.” Migration and migrants have actually -every figure will tell you- have made positive contributions directly, economically, and culturally to any society. And it’s that that we kind of need to hold on to.

Will Brehm 16:46
It seems like the European Union is a neoliberal project. I mean, I know that the austerity policies that the UK implemented, they did so through their own parliament, but Greece and Spain, a lot of these austerity measures that those countries have implemented came directly from the EU and the IMF, and the European Central Bank. And it just makes me think, why, you know, the Brexit vote it is like this particular class of people that have been hurt so much by neoliberalism finally taking a stand against the perhaps undemocratic institution that is seen as very neoliberal.

Susan Robertson 17:34
You’re absolutely right, Will. I mean, that is actually the case. And it’s quite interesting. You asked me what are some of the upsides and, interestingly, Wolfgang Streeck, the former director of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, wrote a fantastic book called “Buying Time”, but his argument was that essentially regionalisms like the EU, once it took the neoliberal turn, particularly around 2004 kind of ramped up, because its policies did tend to be more to the left up until that point. You know, better jobs, social cohesion, and so on. But at that point, it really did take on a different kind of color. His argument is that nations should get out. But in the case of England, I mean we’ve been running down an even worse version of neoliberalism, you know, free market. Well, so the upside here -so, we’ve had a higher education policy white paper going through, which is to absolutely open it up to for-profit firms to operate as universities, and so on. And that’s going to be brought to a halt, I suspect. The argument over the weekend is that these things just need to be put to the side. And maybe there are questions that might be actually asked about these kinds of policies. So that actually England doesn’t become the exemplar of austerity and so on. But some interesting conversations on the weekend. I happened to meet a former student of mine from Hong Kong. And he’s saying that really the Umbrella Movement are actually looking at the Brexit as an example of what Hongkongers might do in relation to mainland China. Now, that’s a very, very big and quite dramatic kind of lesson to be taken from that. But right across Europe, there’s little doubt that different groups will be actually looking at whether they exit or not. The unfortunate thing really here is that it does actually represent a win for the “Marine Le Pen” in France, you know, this kind of extreme right, who are very anti-race, anti … put the walls up, and yet we do have a crisis that’s confronting many of the European countries in Greece, in Italy and so on, you know. And this is a crisis to do with the consequences of foreign policies -mistaken foreign policies- in many senses to do with Iraq, to do with Syria and so on. So, this is a very, very messy period that we had moved into and getting messier in some sense. And actually a period of time that we need I think wise people at the political helm because what we wouldn’t want -you know, I take everything that you say about the disenfranchisement but- what we don’t want is a war of all against all, what we actually need is a better understanding, it seems to me as to who might be to blame amongst the working classes. They’ve pointed their finger at migrants. And this would be -those migrants objectively are in the same situation in many senses as that working class disenfranchised politically, either from other global powers or from the economic system. What we need, I think, is a way in which those disenfranchised nations or classes can see objectively that their interests are the same kinds of interests. And that is once a way in which we can talk together to see that actually these broken societies are actually only going to be fixed if we see that, really, we’ve been dealt a very nasty hand by the economic and political classes, and that’s a job of education. I think that is a job that educators across the different nations around the world should and must take on and that we actually need to work our way toward not just kind of seeing the precarity and the vulnerability of where we stand on the world stage and in world politics and that actually, if we don’t begin these conversations, if we don’t begin this hard work, if we don’t begin to see objectively where our interests actually are, and it’s not against each other, but it’s actually to work through all of the systems that we have to rebuild our institutions like education, so that they are actually mindful of the way in which they must begin to work toward building better societies, better politics, better ways of understanding each other.

Will Brehm 22:53
It seems like you are painting a picture of the “New Left”. You know, it seems as if the immediate result of the Brexit referendum was the far right, xenophobic parties kind of seeing some success. But it almost sounds like there’s actually space for the left to kind of take on maybe a new role in the political life of the UK, but then also maybe in the EU as well.

Susan Robertson 23:27
I completely agree in that. But that “New Left” actually has to absolutely understand what that vote actually means. Okay, that exit vote in many cases -many of these families that voted basically said they didn’t understand the consequences. Now, partly this is to do with the media, or it is in part, I suspect also to do with, our kind of level of political literacy, not understanding actually, something like a referendum and voting out. Maybe indeed, not understanding either that just kind of waving an old Empire flag suddenly makes you grand. All of that actually has to be on the table to be talked about as to how we move, how we both understand that and then move beyond it. But yes, Will, you’re absolutely right. I think there’s a huge job to be done. There’s a big agenda here. And I say that, I mean, people are very anxious about this state of affairs. You can see bits of Latin America falling apart. Europe is in trouble and not just England. Scotland wanting to go its own way. Even London talking about, well as a city, they don’t feel as if they belong to England now. So, yes, a major, major job for the New Left. And that New Left actually has to really look at how it enters in with an agenda that is not opportunist. It enters in with an agenda that really is not just up and down the country. And it’s not just speaking to the middle classes, which is really what Obama and perhaps Ed Miliband had been doing, but it’s actually speaking to those deep fears, misplaced fears, the wrong target. But those deep fears and experiences of those who have pretty much lost out from neoliberalism.

Will Brehm 25:41
Is Jeremy Corbyn someone who can do that?

Susan Robertson 25:45
Well, it’s very interesting. That party is currently in meltdown. At least a third of The Shadow Cabinet this morning, and over the course of 24 hours had resigned. So, it seems to me that leadership needs also to be sufficiently charismatic. So, Corbyn does have a constituency amongst those who have a right to elect the Labour leader. But there’s also some unease that he’s not going to be able to make it into the future. So, it is his kind of politics, nevertheless. A person who has actually reached out to a constituency, it is the agenda that he’s constantly been naming, which is actually around neoliberalism, better jobs, and so on. So, it’s definitely the Corbyn agenda, whether it’s Corbyn himself, I don’t know. But he certainly was in the main able to name a different kind of economic and political agenda into the future. That agenda at least, we have to hold on to. Whether it’s Corbyn himself or someone that can take a bigger constituency forward, I don’t know. But that’s an urgent task that we need now or to get involved with and look at how we might move that forward.

Will Brehm 27:29
Try and think ahead five years from now. What do you think life in the UK is going to be like in the university for say?

Susan Robertson 27:37
Well, there’s a positive -we had many discussions amongst our colleagues perhaps going in and one of my colleagues basically saying, well, she thinks it would Brexit but actually there will be some pedaling backward and, and so on. Five years’ time, I’m thinking, well, could it be that actually there’s some space to pedal back and actually look at the enormity of what’s kind of happened and we haven’t gone down that track. And yet on the other hand, that Europe itself, and those who are guiding Europe also realize something of what’s happened in England, and that has actually kind of emerged, you know, the Netherlands thinking of leaving. So, many countries, you know, Spain, there would be some appetite amongst the Catalans to leave, Scots to leave and so on. So, some efforts to find a different ground. So, that would be the positive spin on it, that we actually use this space and all of our political now’s not to essentially go down this Brexit line, but to look at what kind of maneuvering so that we could actually engage in some politics but not a kind of an all-out outcome of leaving quite in that way. On the other hand, if that does happen, I think then England -there’s very little doubt that the Scots will basically -and quite possibly the Irish- want to leave. And so here what we’ll have, I think will be a very small-minded population at one level if there’s no learning space that takes place. That there is a decision that’s been made, and there’s no learning that’s been done across all of the social classes around quite what it is that we have been, what the vote was about, what needs to happen politically. It’s difficult, it seems to me to say that, you know, single islands economically make it -I’ve spoken on your FreshEd on regions and region building about why and how regions emerge. And there are examples of regional projects, most recently in the Latin American space, ALBA and so on, where the best of what it means to work together as countries. Up until more recently, anyway, you know, Cuba sharing doctors, a welfare sector across that region that actually minimized some of the differences across countries and so on. You know, could we work our way towards that as an outcome? I mean, that’s what my hope would actually be. So, we could go in two ends of a continuum and I’m hoping we kind of charter a middle path and we actually realize the significance of political votes, but actually some retracting back from that position.

Will Brehm 30:58
Well, it’ll be very interesting to follow over the next few years. Susan Robertson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd again. It’s always a pleasure to talk.

Susan Robertson 31:06
Thank you, Will, very much. And maybe in five years’ time on FreshEd, I’d like to be able to say that my more positive scenario had actually come true.

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