Ten Years On, Is Brexit Britain Heading For Its Own January 6th?
A decade after the EU referendum, a by-election on Thursday poses a major test of Britain’s ability to resist the racism and violence it unleashed, says a leading genocide scholar.
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On 18 June, this Thursday, almost 10 years to the day since Britain voted to leave the European Union, voters in Makerfield, Greater Manchester, will decide whether the city-region’s mayor, Andy Burnham, will return to Parliament in order to challenge Keir Starmer for the premiership.
His election is widely seen as the only means of rescuing the ruling Labour Party from its catastrophic decline in popularity since being elected with a huge majority in 2024. But it is also a test of whether Britain can rescue itself from the racism and violence that Brexit unleashed.
Labour’s collapse follows that of the Conservatives, who implemented Brexit in 2020. Both these traditional parties have been floored by the far-right movement headed by Nigel Farage, Brexit’s prime instigator. A by-election victory for his Reform UK party will be seen as a decisive step towards his becoming prime minister in 2029.
Even if Burnham wins, Labour is unlikely to gain an overall majority again. To block the far right, Britain’s progressive forces – Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists and the left-wing Greens, together with their voters – will have to unite in a way they have never done before.
But that will be difficult unless the left can overcome division around the one issue that has fractured the progressive bloc more than anything else: the Gaza genocide. If it can’t, we will likely witness what the U.S. did in 2024 with Donald Trump’s victory – Nigel Farage will win.
The Referendum
To understand how we got here, we have to go back to 2016 and the racist nationalism that helped the Brexit campaign succeed.