ALL politics is, in the final analysis, local. Andrew Bowles was the Tory leader of Swale Borough Council on the North Kent coast until he was booted out by Faversham’s electors.

He achieved notoriety when the Tories briefly suspended him after he tweeted support for Stephen Yaxley-Lennon — alias “Tommy Robinson” — before reinstating him to lead the doomed Tory campaign in the council elections.

Faversham is a smallish town on the Thames estuary which has carried out a comprehensive cull of its council which has, with the exception of an occasional Labour or Lib Dem and a clutch of mostly progressive-minded independents, been a Conservative fiefdom ever since the brewing and shipbuilding town lost much of its industrial base.

By a series of circumstances with fortuitous consequences, Labour failed to nominate candidates for the town’s Boughton ward and two excellent Green Party candidates, one a popular local doctor and the other a well regarded psychology professor — who is the Greens’ longstanding parliamentary candidate for the seat held by newly minted Tory frontwoman Helen Whatley MP — outvoted the unsavoury Tory by a country mile.

In an equally fortunate turn of events the Greens found themselves unable to field candidates in the St Anne’s ward and two excellent Labour people, one a well known Usdaw shop steward at the local supermarket and the other a strategically minded and energetic retired local government officer, won the seats.

The main beneficiaries of the Tory cull in the Faversham parish were the Lib Dems but they sit with a rainbow coalition of other forces in the new anti-Tory majority on Swale borough where Labour lead and have started changing the direction of local politics in a progressive direction after years of Tory reaction and indolence.

What is distinctive about the political micro-climate of Faversham is the formation of an anti-Tory majority that channelled the frustrations of thousands of local residents into a palpable mood for change.

Part of this is due to the many local campaigns — Morning Star readers will be familiar with the Swing the Bridge campaign featured a while back — and part to the effectiveness of a local tabloid community newspaper, Faversham Eye, whose diligent writers subjected the various misdeeds, corrupt dealings and scummy behaviour of the local elite to withering exposure and in doing so helped shape the popular movement which swept the Tories from office.

In the referendum the town divided along lines almost an exact reflection of the national picture and this is a good indication of its class composition.

Naturally the picture is more complex than this but broadly speaking working-class voters tended to vote Leave and middle-class voters mostly opted for Remain. Brexit is the main subject of dispute on the local Faversham Politics forum where debate is usually well conducted and admirably regulated.

One of its regular contributors — who advocates that Britain remains in the EU — invited me to codify my views so I thought I might try them out on a Morning Star readership first.

I have yet to find anyone who is a fully fledged supporter of the EU as it presently exists. Clearly Brexiteers and Lexiteers are critical from a variety of standpoints.

The great majority of Remainers see themselves as conscious bearers of progressive ideas. They attach value to things like the freedom to travel, work and live. They conceive of the EU principally as a mechanism for allowing unimpeded trade, maintaining standards of food hygiene, health and safety, subsidising research and technological advance, facilitating student exchanges and as a force for preventing inter-European conflict.

Some see it as a useful global counterweight to a USA in which Donald Trump is presently the decisive figure.

The Brexit campaign waged by the Tory dissidents, the official Leave campaign, Farage and the reactionary media is seen as a chauvinist farrago of untruths and the principal figures involved a bunch of racist reactionaries.

Presented with incontrovertible facts that the EU treaties are a powerful constraint on measures to return public services, utilities and transport to public ownership they are prepared to concede the point. When given chapter and verse on the way judgements of the European Court of Justice have given employers the power to import workers and pay them at rates lower then locally negotiated, many will admit it is regrettable.

When presented with evidence that members of the European Parliament cannot initiate legislation and that decisive power resides in the Commission and the Council of Ministers some will admit to a democratic deficit in the EU.

The revelation that the austerity policies of the Lib Dem and Tory coalition and the present Tory government cannot be distinguished from the EU’s Stability Pact regime is a surprise.

And many are shocked to find that the Tory and New Labour enthusiasm for the Private Finance Initiative was rooted in a willing embrace of the Maastricht Treaty which enabled governments to get infrastructure investment off the government’s books if only at the cost of an unsupportable burden on future generations and a massive profit boost to the privatisers.

Those who believed Nick Clegg’s assertion that the idea of a European army and air force was left-wing scaremongering now find that the Lib Dem leader’s pledge to abolish tuition fees was not the only porky he told.

Presented with War on Want’s assertion that the EU’s policy of aggressively seeking to plunder the natural resources of Africa and Asia for the benefit of European business, rather than allowing developing countries to use those resources for their own needs, people will nod in agreement.

Given details of how the EU funded a wall to stop Middle Eastern refugees from seeking asylum in Europe and that the slave traders and warlords put in power by Nato’s war on Libya are paid to police the Mediterranean to stop migrant and refugee boats they will admit to being alarmed by this example of EU-sponsored racism.

We thus have the slightly disturbing picture of well intentioned people who, when challenged on the substance of their illusions about the direction the European Union is taking, will admit to many of the facts available but cannot allow themselves to modify their overall view.

It is hard to resist the conclusion that many people have allowed the toxic character of the bourgeois Brexit campaign to determine their overall conception of the problems entailed in Britain’s membership of the EU — and the nature of the beast itself — rather than their own analysis.

Perhaps it also reflects an internalised recognition that membership of the European Union is the main foundation of the way our ruling class conceive of Britain’s relationship with the global capitalist economy and a fear of the human and social costs of challenging this state of affairs.

There are few clearer examples of the way in which the ideas of the ruling class become the ruling ideas of society.

Challenging bourgeois hegemony is not a task that can be exclusively conducted at the level of ideology and the referendum result, which in Faversham and similar areas produced the highest turnout of working-class voters in any election in the present era, represented the re-entry into politics of a section of the working class that has been marginalised for decades and which is the principal victim of the neoliberal policies that characterise Britain in capitalist Europe.

The Faversham example shows it is not possible to fit people into rigid categories when it comes to present day politics. The course of events in this quite typical market town shows that independently of the conscious political actors, popular opinion finds a way of exerting a decisive influence on events.

Already the local Lib Dems, “dizzy with success,” are finding that the clear commitment by both candidates for their party leadership are more than willing to launch a nuclear strike has taken the gloss off them as a potential repository for progressive votes.

The childish antics of the Lib Dems in the European Parliament, an almost geometrical match for the equally idiotic behaviour of the Brexit Party MEPs, has brought home to some the marked irrelevance of that body to real life politics and their marginal purchase on real decision-making in the EU.

Germany’s warlike minister of defence — a politician committed to an expansion of Germany’s military — has been established in high EU office by the usual opaque dealing. On the EU’s support for Nato’s forward posture in eastern Europe one local wit pointed out: “That didn’t go well last time, did it?”

Outside the imaginary universe of ultra-left fantasists and the more hard-headed of Labour’s pro-EU right wing it is hard to find people who exult in Labour’s recent renegotiation of its pre election Brexit strategy. Most people understand that three years of trench warfare have produced little progress either in meeting the commitments that both Labour and the Tories made to implement the Brexit vote and that there have been only marginal changes in public opinion.

There is a sense that only an election can produce a new political geometry which might make possible a resolution of the pressing problems of Britain’s economy, the housing crisis, the state of the NHS, the mess that privatisation and academisation has made of education, mounting skills shortages and austerity.

At the same time, despite the empty rhetoric of the Love Socialism Hate Brexit initiative — which remarkably has attracted the support of MPs and Labour peers previously distinguished by a lack of enthusiasm for any kind of socialism — there is little sense that a Labour government could be a decisive force in effecting progressive changes within the EU. This slight note of a despairing realism is grounded in a realistic estimation of the balance of forces.

Disentangling Britain from the EU’s neoliberal embrace can only be a process, not a single act. The only basis on which a significant shift in opinion can take place is when a Labour government begins to implement the kind of policies that cannot be achieved within the framework of the EU’s system of treaty obligations.