A few weeks ago, a friend of mine, Paul Embery, found himself hit by a Twitter storm. Paul is a trade unionist, a socialist and is emerging as a polemical journalist of some distinction. Like many, but not all who identify as Blue Labour, he argues strongly for the democratic and radical possibilities of Brexit, which he views as a class issue. He found himself engaged in a Twitter spat with Mike Harding, who describes himself on his website as a “singer, songwriter, comedian, author, poet, broadcaster and multi-instrumentalist”, and there is no reason to doubt that he is all those things and more. He views Brexit as a horrible prelude to a new world war. Mike is from Crumpsall in Manchester, Paul is from Dagenham in the borderlands of Essex and east London. It was never going to go well.
Harding posted a tweet, roughly consistent with the vision of John Lennon’s “Imagine”, which stated that a “nation is not a home” but a collection of individuals who share a status of citizenship and not anything like a “homeland”. Paul replied that “this encapsulates the divide within society between a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle class… and a rooted, communitarian, patriotic working-class”. Mike Harding suggested that Paul Embery should read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
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