Brexit Reality

The Brexit process is nearing its climax. With the Green Party conference meeting in Bristol this weekend, some thoughts on their and other Remainers' campaign for a second referendum on British membership of the European Union. Is focusing on a new vote detracting from at least mitigating the reality of the now inevitable post-Brexit Britain being fashioned by the Tories?

June 2018, and by 17,410,742 - the largest vote for anything ever recorded in the UK - to 16,141,241 the decision is to exit the European Union.

Except, the Leavers lied. Their voters were misled, under-educated, and, well, just bitter about life. They didn’t know what was good for them. They were angry or racist or dead, or all three. (“Dead” is not sarcasm – one Lib Dem would-be actuary got out the mortality tables and, projecting from exit polls, declared that the Leave majority would be mouldering in the grave within 3 years - a line Nick Clegg later took in a BBC interview).

The most appalling, elitist smears have been called down on Leave voters, making it pretty clear that liberal democracy has in fact sparse room for actual democracy. Not unserious demands for people over 65 to be disenfranchised feel like a precursor to a return to the second business vote, or the reintroduction of University MPs. Some Remainer memes and arguments have sought to count non-voters and even babies as anti-Brexit votes.The People have spoken, damn them – time to get a new People.

Claiming to speak for the 10% perhaps rather than the 1%, a lobby of liberal professionals who benefit quite nicely from the opportunities afforded by the EU are irate. Extremely so. Why should their parade be rained on by an unholy alliance of Left Behinders on their grotty northern housing estates and ageing, Daily Mail-chewing Blue Rinse Zombies down in Brexiteer Bournemouth?

A second referendum must be held. One to put things right.

Except that it wouldn’t put things right at all. Aside from the fact that the polls do not show any significant overall movement either way since 2016, what would a rerun do? 

A narrow Leave vote would probably engender a revived UKIP, or worse, and a hard Brexit would turn into tungsten one. A narrow Remain win would face calls for yet a further plebiscite for a “best of three”- and again revive Ukip, or worse, as many among the 52% concluded that voting truly is pointless. 

But, aside from anything else, a second vote isn’t going to happen. The Tories will not concede one and, in spite of the hype, no one is going to make them. No one can. Not even JC at his most miraculously messianic. 

Greens are making a terrible strategic mistake in expending our limited political capital running with Cable, his Lib Desperadoes and a coterie of washed-up Blairite chancers. If the Leave campaign excelled in “fake news” such as Turkey’s imminent relocation from Anatolia to Croydon, it is now well-matched by dire warnings that by April Britain will run out of everything from cream soda to donated sperm. Much smacks of the panicked Scottish unionists during the independence referendum wildly warning YES voters that Doctor Who wouldn’t be on the telly any more, while Nicola Sturgeon would be waiting at Gretna to check your car boot for anyone smuggling Tories across the border. 

And no one made any distinction between so-called "hard" and "soft" Brexits until after the referendum result. Nor did anyone talk about any confirmatory referendum - neither Cameron when he called the vote, nor Clegg when he called for a "straight in/out" referendum in 2008, nor the Greens' Caroline Lucas when she proposed an amendment to a Eurosceptic backbench referendum bill in 2011.

Don’t get me wrong: I campaigned and voted Remain. I was as disappointed by the result as most Remainers. My support though was very much about countering the rise of racism and more positively to fostering internationalism – but that particular ship has sailed. We need to work out now how to heal divisions and address the outcome rather than try to wish it away. Just as impeaching Trump would be the biggest shot in the arm American populists could dream for, our apparent rejection of the referendum only confirms rather than challenges the beliefs that led to the outcome in the first place.

The environmental benefits of EU membership are significant, but they can be over-stated, because the economics of Europe have long been definitively anti-environmental. The EU is one of the biggest free trade blocs in the world. How can such an institution fit with the urgent need to develop localised green economies and sharply reduce the transportation of “things” across our crisis-stricken planet? All the more so when its trade policies are so harshly biased against poorer states outside the Union - it is a longstanding ally of the austerity and privatisation restructure programmes of the IMF and World Bank, disrupting the ecologies of many African and other Third World states in the process.

We are warned that apocalyptic queues of trucks will form at Dover post-Brexit. Kent will become a giant lorry park. Bad stuff - but consider what all these hordes of huge carbon waggons are doing day in day out right now as they carry their cargoes from Tallinn to Truro.

In terms of social benefits, contrary to myth, the corporatist EU does not guarantee employment rights. Apart from the discrimination directives (which notably did not stop the Coalition introducing tribunal fees for discrimination cases at triple the norm), our employment protection regulations are almost entirely set domestically. The same goes for holidays, established by UK law in the 1930s and driven by trade unions, not by international capitalists. By contrast, the EU was content to exempt Britain from key parts of the working time regulations. 

Greens talk of reforming Europe – but there is no blueprint for that in existence. Nowhere in our policies is there anything beyond a bigger say for the Parliament in the workings of the Commission. While the hard work of Green MEPs from both the UK and other EU states on social protections must be lauded, the bottom line is that zero hours contracts and the gig economy, the housing crisis, NHS privatisation and near unprecedented social inequality have all prospered inside the EU. There may be no Lexit under Theresa May, but there is no Lemain either.

We have a historic opportunity and an urgent need to portray a post-Brexit Green society: to promote wealth redistribution, sustainable agriculture, co-operative enterprises, public ownership of clean energy and transport, and the re-industrialisation of our economy using small-scale, local enterprises to manufacture infinitely more of the goods we use. In other words, to provide an alternative to the dark future being fashioned by the Tories right now. 

Green MEPs have recognised that, while unwelcome of itself, Brexit could provide "transformative opportunities" for the UK economy.

"…we recognise that Brexit does provide some opportunities for radical change in the UK economy, for example in trade relations and expenditure on agriculture. The economic challenge of Brexit has shocked the government out of the policy of austerity and offers us important opportunities in terms of making significant and timely investments in the transition to the greener economy that climate change demands." (Greening Brexit, Molly Scott Cato et al, November 2016)

This rather than pushing ceaselessly for a second vote should be the cri de coeur for Greens and their allies. This can be the springboard of creating at least an awareness of an alternative Brexit reality to the chaos of May, Mogg and Johnson.

Brexit will be a huge challenge, no doubt. There will be significant disruption, especially in the first few months. But much, much worse is coming very soon in any case as the environmental and resource crises deepen rapidly across the entire planet. The challenge for us is to engage with the majority who have no real stake in our society because so much of it is being accumulated by an ever smaller elite. 

All the liberal arguments in the world do not even begin to address the day to day lives of most people, and do nothing to resolve the barriers so many face in our current economy - a process stretching back to almost the very time we joined Europe and so not surprisingly, nor entirely inaccurately, associated with it by many. Fail to do this and, like the Russian Kadets and Mensheviks in March 1917 who fussed over the legal theories and niceties of drafting new constitutions while the Bolsheviks won the hearts and minds of the people with their demands of "Peace, Bread and Land", the momentum will stay with those who seek the harshest Brexit of all and a dystopian society for our country.

Greens and others on the Left can squander this precious time tilting at referendum windmills. Or we can focus furiously on advocating for the social justice, environmental sustainability and economic resilience we need for civilised society to survive and thrive. The choice is ours.

A slightly shorter version of this article appears in the conference edition of the Green Left's "Watermelon" journal. This can also be found on the Green Left website. Please note that this article is a personal view and not GL policy. 

The Twin Pillars of Survival: What is the Green Party For?

"We cannot tackle climate change unless we address the system that has caused it,"
 John McDonnell, now Labour Shadow Chancellor, writing in Another World Is Possible - A Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism in 2007.

Ten years on, there was the same man, just yesterday, on the BBC Marr Programme, doing his best to reassure the audience that a Labour Government would prevent any post-election run on the Pound by working hard with the City to keep the confidence of the financial speculators, something he has already been busy doing. Marr himself signed off laconically with the observation, "I do like the picture of John McDonnell sitting down with asset managers all the time."

McDonnell's caution is understandable - the precarious situation of the Tory-DUP pact makes a further election far from an impossibility in the coming months. Labour's vulnerability to the fury of the capitalist media and quite inaccurate but well-embedded psychological fiction that greedy Tories are better with public money has lost them more than one election.

Yet, for all Labour's exuberant return to its programme remains inherently social democratic rather than socialist. And for all Mr McDonnell talked about tackling climate change yesterday, his economic plans remain fully anchored in 1940s style Keynesianism, with continued growth at their heart. It may be a welcome shift in emphasis from the grasping privatisation of the Tories (and discredited New Labour), but it is avowedly not a Manifesto for 21st Century Socialism, nor indeed for 21st Century Survival. For, with the climate emergency threatening to overtake us and deep scarcity looming across a range of vital resources in barely a decade from now, traditional economics are no longer fit for purpose, whether touted by the Tories or by Labour.

This conundrum much occupied the agenda of the Green Party conference last week. For the Greens, the General Election was a bitter-sweet outcome: their decision to stand down in upwards of 35 constituencies may have made sufficient of a difference to deprive the Tories of their outright majority, but equally the party saw its vote halve from its 2015 record over over 1.1 million votes and in spite of huge efforts in several seats it failed to advance on its solitary MP, the Co-Leader, Caroline Lucas - though it is worth bearing in mind that this was still its second best-ever General Election performance, both in terms of its national aggregate poll and votes-by-seat.

Under the circumstances, some degree of reflection was both to be expected and very necessary. Corbyn's manifesto had swept up a wide range of Green proposals from 2015 and with them had taken several hundred thousand Green voters - where now, then, for their twin pillars of environmental sustainability and social justice? Time, some suggested, to return to their verdant roots and focus on being an ecological party. Two motions proposed that climate change should be included in every conceivable message. Another called for all talk of alliances with Labour to be closed down. A workshop on campaigning heard demands for the Greens to focus on winning Tory votes and to drop calls for taxing the rich or taking resources into public ownership.

Fortunately, all these were voted down - the Greens were not, after all, so ready to stop highlighting their commitment to social justice alongside tackling environmental sustainability. Indeed, many questioned why anyone would doubt the interdependency of the one with the other - as even a longstanding ecologist argued, a steady-state economy would not be feasible without massive redistribution of wealth.

Yet by itself, this reaffirmation of the twin pillars of their values is far from enough to give the Greens' continued resonance and purpose in the political arena. The ecologists were right to argue that the party needs to highlight its differences with the Labour Party rather than appear like a willing subset of Momentum. The need to campaign on climate change in these days of Trumpian America and a British Government with Brexititis is daily more evidently critical - but far, far beyond raising the threat of global warming, the party needs to focus on what is central to defeating it: economics and ownership.

The cruel fact is this - Labour's social democracy will fail. For all their inspiration and well-meaning, Corbyn and McDonnell inevitably are dragged down by the bureaucracy and incumbency and even conservatism that comes with leading the Official Opposition. Hence the Marxist lamb sits down with the Asset-stripping lions and cautiously pushes change within the contradiction of consistency - a word McDonnell repeatedly used in his interview with Andrew Marr. 

Sooner or later, in a world of systemic collapse, it will not be enough. In a time when politics has never been more volatile, with voters earnestly or even desperately searching for new answers to increasingly challenging questions, only a party or movement convincingly embracing genuine radical change, far, far beyond building new roads and stopping PPI hospital contracts, can offer a positive way forward. All else leads ultimately to ever more pain and chaos.

As we face a world slipping week by week further towards climate chaos, the challenge to the Greens is whether it is they who can fashion a clear, radical and egalitarian economics - one founded on a steady-state economy that brings nearly all resources into common ownership, that embraces the bounty that new technology can bring in freeing people from labour and that stewards our limited resources fairly and sustainably. To do this, they need to address how to remove the market system from large swathes of economic activity and so reduce waste and inequity. They need to develop a clear narrative of how localised economies can work for the benefit of all.

Then they need to show how all of these things would work, day by day, for citizens, for families and communities. In a Green society, how would you get a house, or an education? What sort of jobs would exist and what would your working conditions be like? How would you travel about and would it still cost anything? What would you be able to do with the free time gained from a shorter working week? What new possibilities might open up post-capitalism, post-scarcity, post-rat race?

They also need to get angry: they need to bare their teeth not just to the frackers and tree-cutters, which so many Greens and their allies have very bravely done so well of late, but to all the vested corporate interests that are commodifying everything on our planet - even, it turns out, our individual DNA. Such behemoths will not go gently into the night; Greens need to gird themselves for a harder and longer struggle than Mr McDonnell seems willing to contemplate as he sups with the Futures traders, regardless of the length of his spoon.

And with the imbalance of wealth, nationally and globally, at historically obscene and environmentally unsustainable levels, yes, they need to take on the rich because the rich are not the friends of humanity nor of our planet. They never were, they are not now and, no matter how much charity a few of them dole out, they never will be.

But beyond them, beyond their fetish for accumulation and alienation, the rest of us, the vast, overwhelming majority of homo sapiens can transform our world and share it equitably.

Of all the parties capable of producing a first blueprint of that new world, perhaps only the Greens have the space to dream it into being, to fashion it into something real, meaningful and genuinely transformative. Many good policies are already in place covering everything from citizens' income to a maximum wage to employee ownership - but they have still to be joined up and given a compelling narrative, a true vision of tomorrow. 

It must be one they are open to sharing with other radicals on the left as the dynamics of our politics remain as potently fluid as they are now. They need to stand ready to work with those with shared values from other parties, transcending the tribalist barriers that all too often have frustrated the popular will - and one of these parties, for the foreseeable future by far and away the largest, will be Labour, or at least part of Labour.

Unencumbered by the Establishment weights increasingly affixed to McDonnell and Corbyn, the Greens can be the forge to generate the ideas and build a movement to create the conditions for deep, radical cultural change. Through this we can then finally unleash, in the words of the ecosocialist Murray Bookchin, "the basic sense of decency, sympathy and mutual aid (which) lies at the core of human behaviour."

Murray Bookchin, ecosocialist