In south Wales, far-right sentiment is growing as the Brexit crisis offers fertile ground for hate

Cardiff is starting to feel the first impact of Britain leaving the EU even before it has actually departed.

Andrew Woodman, a burly trade union leader based in the Welsh capital, does not look like a sick man, but he suffers from a rare and very dangerous illness called Addison’s disease.

The treatment is frequent doses of steroids and other medications.

“If I fail to take the steroids I could slip into a coma and be dead within three hours,” says Woodman. He must carry ampoules for injection in the event of an emergency, but these have a limited shelf-life and he needs regular fresh supplies.

He recently went to his usual pharmacy to obtain a new batch of these life-saving drugs, but was informed by the pharmacist that she did not have them in stock. She told Woodman that “we can’t get hold of them” and explained it was because of Brexit.

She did not give him details, but the likelihood is that either suppliers or consumers are building up reserve supplies of the drug to guard against future shortages. The pharmacist suggested that Woodman would “have to hold on to those [medications] that have expired a little bit longer”.

The experience of being denied the drugs that he needs to keep himself alive reinforced Woodman’s opposition to the UK leaving the EU. “I am horrified by the biggest act of national self-harm in my lifetime – I am 52 – and probably going back a lot earlier,” he says. “It’s not as bad as going to war, but it’s not far off.”

He does not see the political and economic damage as something confined to a post-Brexit future, but as a destructive process that is underway and already inflicting losses among real people. As a regional organiser for Unison in Wales, he deals with the problems of union members such as staff at less well-known and less well-funded universities that can no longer attract foreign students. The prospective students are deterred by Brexit uncertainties over their status and qualifications but formerly paid high fees and were an essential cash-cow for the institutions.

Woodman says he is particularly concerned about the University of South Wales. Brexit, he believes, “has the capacity to bankrupt the place because the supply of overseas students has dried up”. Other universities are coming under intense financial pressure, meaning “lecturers and support staff are being let go … I am trying to save my members’ jobs”. He adds that Brexit is exacerbating the crisis in the NHS in Wales because of the difficulty in recruiting foreign doctors and nurses who have hitherto kept it going.

Ian Thomas, a psychiatric nurse at Llandough Hospital in the Vale of Glamorgan, agrees that the active recruitment of foreign medical workers has been essential. “The maternity services in Llandough would have collapsed if it was not for the Filipino nurses,” he says.

Debate in Britain over the advantages and disadvantages of leaving the EU have focused largely on the economic consequences of the move. The first concrete signs of this are in higher education and health as well as in international companies such as Airbus and Nissan. But it is the political changes in Britain produced by the 2016 referendum which are more advanced and more visible than the economic ones – and which have the potential to be much more serious.

Two very different political trends have gathered pace since the vote to leave the EU and are becoming irreversible: Britain is a far more divided society, perhaps more so than at any time since the Home Rule crises in the 19^th and early 20^th century and possibly since the turmoil of the 17^th century. “People who lived happily next door to each other are now at daggers drawn,” says Woodman. Grievances that have little or nothing to do with the EU have been energised and envenomed by the anti-EU vote.

Cardiff and south Wales are a useful guide to the politics of Brexit in Britain because the outcome of the referendum here helps demolish conventional wisdom about why a majority of those who went to the polls in the rest of Britain wanted to exit the EU.

Wales voted Leave by 52.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent, which surprised some because it receives substantial EU subsidies, amounting to £680m a year, according to the Welsh government. What’s more, Remain was backed by the Labour Party, which has dominated Welsh politics for the past 97 years. Yet only five out of 22 local authorities voted to remain, very much mirroring the split in England between poor and better off, less educated and well-educated, old and young.

Cardiff, a prosperous-looking city of 350,000 – one of five UK cities most dependent on EU markets – voted 60 per cent to stay in the EU. But the valleys just to the north of Cardiff, a de-industrialised region once filled with coal mines and steel plants, opted strongly for Leave. The pattern of voting was much the same as in England, though the valleys are famous for their strongly-held Welsh identity and loyalty to the Labour Party, something which they were to confirm in the 2017 general election.

The outcome of the referendum in Wales puts in doubt the widely credited belief that Brexit was significantly fuelled by resurgent English nationalism and nostalgia for a lost imperial past. This thesis looks less convincing if Welsh socialists, who do not feel the same about the British empire and are still bitter about the crushing of the miners’ strike in 1984-85, voted the same way as English Leavers.

Care also needs to be taken when arguing about the degree to which the Brexit vote was propelled by opposition to immigration and Islamophobia, because, while there are many immigrant communities in Cardiff, there are very few in the valleys, where there is not a single mosque according to residents.

Of course, the absence of immigrants on the street does not necessarily mean that there is no hostility towards their presence nationally. Local opinion is split on this, but Graham Simmonds, an independent member of Caerphilly Council who is a Leave supporter, says that emphasis on anti-immigration as an issue in the valleys “is just a stick that the media uses to beat us”. He adds: “I have never encountered it.”

Whatever the role of the anti-immigrant vote, there is a simple reason why Cardiff, a government centre with much employment in health and education (it has three universities), should vote differently from the families of former miners and steel workers in the valleys.

West Wales and the valleys, once a hub of the industrial revolution in Britain, today top the list of the five poorest areas in northern Europe, according to 2016 figures. Interestingly, the next four on the list are all in England: Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, and the Tees Valley and Durham. As in Wales, these deprived regions voted strongly for Brexit, with Lincolnshire having the highest proportion of Leave voters in the UK. Poverty, not national identity, appears to be the dominant factor.

Immigration is an easy explanation for people in deprived areas who want to know why they are jobless or have ill-paid, insecure employment. Pro-Brexit tabloids have for decades drip-fed readers with stories portraying immigrants as parasites on the NHS and the undeserved recipients of largesse through exploiting state benefits.

Even so, it is difficult to judge the extent of anti-immigrant feeling, because people are embarrassed to express it and, even when they did in interviews with The Independent, some later asked for their comments to be removed. Police figures for hate crimes or abuse are not very accurate because officers often do not have the resources, the numbers or the inclination to follow such incidents up, according to Cardiff residents.

Those from ethnic minorities in the city are better judges of the extent to which the referendum and its aftermath turbo-charged racism in Britain and raised it to a new and more toxic level. Trade union leaders from minority communities (Pakistani, Sikh, Caribbean, Portuguese) spoke to The Independent about their personal experience of racism and about their members who had filed or been the targets of complaints about alleged abuse.

Shavanah Taj is a national officer for the Public and Commercial Services Union, whose father came from Pakistan to work in a steel plant in south Wales in 1958-59. She is married to a Nigerian and has two children aged five and seven. She says that racist abuse has markedly increased in the last three or four years, though she stresses that it was also bad in the past.

“In the 1980s we used to regularly have dog shit in Tesco bags pushed through our letter box and ‘Pakis Out’ in big letters written on the side wall of our house.” She says this of kind of abuse ebbed in the following years, but has now returned – and strengthened.

As an Asian woman with two small children, she says she has been harassed by white men who block her way in the street. Invariably, when she walks into a shop “the security guard will follow me around”.

For the first time she and her husband are asking themselves if they will get to the point when they no longer think of the areas as home. Previously, she and her family had never felt it necessary to have a Plan B about where they should live. Now they wonder if they ought to.

Amarjite Singh, a Sikh who works for the Royal Mail, is branch secretary of the Communications Workers Union and wears a distinctive red turban. He agrees with Taj that open racism receded from the end of the 1980s up to 2016. Other are less sanguine and say there has been mounting Islamophobia propelled by 9/11, 7/7 and the rise of Isis after 2014.

Singh says the most significant change is the degree to which the extreme right is today able to mobilise people. “I haven’t seen so many far-right demonstrations up and down the country ever before with rallies on the same weekend in Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle,” he says.

Brexit may originally have been about leaving the EU and about anxiety over immigration from Eastern Europe – indeed, says Singh, many Sikhs voted Leave because they thought foreigners were coming to take their jobs. But then they found that immigrants from the subcontinent and beyond were also targeted.

Singh recalls: “Two weeks ago I was on a bus and there was a Somali woman with a baby in a pram who could not put it in the space allotted for it because a young man was blocking it. When the bus driver told him to let her park the pram there, the young man replied: ‘Who does she think she is? She’s only a foreigner’.”

Woodman, whose mother immigrated to the UK from Portugal in 1952 and whose father came from Guyana, agrees that the Brexit vote has exacerbated racism, saying: “It emboldens people, as it does in Trump’s America, to say in public what they used to say in private. I have been called the n-word and that rarely happened in recent years.” He adds that it is wrong to blame everything on Brexit, but he finds it difficult to think of any other explanation for the racist surge.

White indigenous residents in south Wales confirm that the extreme right is becoming legitimised in a way that it was not in the past. Ian Thomas, who has long campaigned against racism, says he is more worried now than he has ever been before, because he believes that racial hatred, that was always there, but hidden, is coming increasingly to the surface.

He says: “I know a plasterer who told me that he is now reading a book by Tommy Robinson [founder of the far-right English Defence League] called Enemy of the State which he says is the first book that he has ever read.”

The rise of the extreme right and open displays of racism have occurred in the past (Oswald Mosley in the 1930s, the Notting Hill riots in the 1950s, Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, the National Front in the 1970s) but they have peaked and then evaporated or returned to obscurity. Often, they took advantage of periods of acute economic and political instability which came to an end.

What is so different about the current crisis over Brexit is that there is no reason why the crisis should come to an end any time soon, and every reason why it should get worse, providing the far-right with fertile ground to expound their racist creed.

Not all the arrows point in the same direction and some polls show that hostility to immigrants has receded somewhat since 2016, when Syrian refugees were flooding into Europe and Isis was carrying out highly publicised atrocities in the centre of European capitals.

But in the eyes of many people, immigrants remain a threat and the evidence is that this perception has not changed very much. As Woodman says, all that you need to do to generate racial hatred “is to persuade people that those who are different from themselves are the reason they are poor”.