Anyone who wants to know how and why Donald Trump got elected as president of the United States could do no better than catch the current West End play in London’s Gielgud Theatre.
Pulitzer Prize winner for Dram “Sweat” by Lynn Nottage is set in a rust-belt bar in busily de-industrialising America, when US blue-collar properly paid union jobs were floating down the Rio Grande to cheap labour Mexico under Bill Clinton’s NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).
And although set in the US the bar could have been anywhere in the North of England or the Midlands during the exactly analogous rust-belting of Britain’s Brexit-lands. For NAFTA read Maastricht, the “single market” and the “Customs Union”
The play showcases an American working class not usually seen in Hollywood or Broadway since “The Deerhunter” and indeed like the characters in Michael Cimino’s Oscar-winning epic many of the characters on stage have Polish-American names, all blended into America’s melting pot.
In the beginning one character has been locked out – in perpetuity – in defence of the almost holy “Union Card” but at least his wife and children are still working “in the plant” and where most of the characters have 20-30 years of service, good industrial wages, health insurance and retirement packages.
Under pressure the workers drink increasingly morosely after their shifts and suspicion of management grows exponentially. When it is discovered that the company is secretly hiring low-paid Latino workers without cards the whole plot explodes – literally in violence.
The shadow workforce are recruited because the management are about to remove production lines and ship them south, and force the remaining workforce to slash their wages and give up their benefits – all on pain of the plant leaving the United States altogether.
This happened in real life countless times in states like Pennsylvania Wisconsin Michigan Virginia all left to rust and the workers to rot. And it was in precisely those states where Hillary Clinton daren’t campaign because of her own husband’s culpability in the workers plight and where of course Donald Trump won the election.
Senator Bernie Sanders – the sole Senator to OPPOSE NAFTA – and himself possessing working-class appeal in abundance would have won those states easily and President Trump would never have been a thing.
So a pebble tossed into a stagnant mill-pond has become a tidal-wave in the Persian Gulf which might yet drown us all.
The comparisons with Brexit-Britain were unmissable to me at least though most of the audience probably paid that no mind. For this is now a tale of two countries, not Labour and Conservative not even “left” and “right” but between Brexit and Remain. Perhaps never will the twain meet again.
George Galloway
London