Videos: Another Europe Is Possible - the Radical Case for Remain

In the last month or so of the European referendum debate in the UK, we have been treated, if that is the word, to a contest of rumour, complaint, exaggeration and pettiness between two male gangs of Hooray Henry Old Etonians. Prime Minister David Cameron has gone head to head with his old Bullingdon Club mate, former London Mayor and would-be Tory PM Boris Johnson, in a reprise of their old party game of smashing everything up - except that this time, its' not Boris setting the toilets on fire in a jolly rich arsed jape, but our country and its' future that are at stake.

The Eurotunnel at Manchester

So it has been refreshingly positive this last week to witness the Another Europe Is Possible campaign swinging fully into action. This grouping of Greens, Labour, Left Unity, trade unions, artists and other progressives of a left-wing viewpoint has been powerfully articulating why we need to stay in Europe to work hard for a better, fairer and more sustainable social Europe. To leave, they argue, would be a fatal error on the part of the country and especially any left wingers contemplating supporting Brexit.

In theory the UK could elect a socialist government and seek to create a socialist society, but the reality on 24 May should we vote to leave is that it will not be socialists who will be ascendant, but the hard right of Farage, Johnson, Patel and Gove. These are all people who have spent their political careers destroying the public NHS, seeking to reduce workplace rights, opposing EU action on stopping tax evasion by the rich and longing to withdraw us from the European Court of Human Rights. With President Putin of Russia, would-be President Trump of the USA and Rupert Murdoch of global capitalism all lining up with them, any progressive hoping Brexit would mean a blow to neoliberalism would be sorely disappointed.

Owen Jones: TTIP is dead

 So Another Europe offers a different path - one of working together to create a more progressive European Union. It is not as some would claim a bosses club - it is for now a vehicle proposing austerity purely because the majority of Governments in the EU, including our own, support austrity platforms which, in turn, they have been elected to implement. The challenge for the left is to change national governments, not leave the EU.

There has been a marked success already - the loathsome TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership (TTIP) looks dead in the water after mass protests by left wingers across Europe, culminating in the French Government making clear it will veto it if it is pursued in its current form. Ironically - or perhaps deviously - many of the Brexit leaders, when representing the British Government, have been the most enthusiastic proponents of TTIP, which they now claim to be a major EU-created threat to the UK.

So, here are a few speeches from the Another Europe  rally at the Peoples' History Museum in Manchester yesterday afternoon. The videos start with perhaps the most powerful contribution - from Pablo Bustinduy, an MP of the Spanish radical Podemos Movement, which has shaken the very foundations of his country's political system - but which continues to want to remain in the European Union and very much hopes that British socialists and progressives will remain as well to work in genuine international solidarity.

PABLO BUSTINDUY (PODEMOS)

CLIVE LEWIS MP (LABOUR)

FROM THE ANOTHER EUROPE IS POSSIBLE LAUNCH IN LONDON ON 28 MAY:

CAROLINE LUCAS MP (GREEN)

YANIS VAROUFAKIS (DIEM25 - Democracy In Europe Movement 2025)

INTERVIEW WITH JOHN MCDONNELL, LABOUR SHADOW CHANCELLOR (Open Democracy)

What Did EU Do In The War, Father?

from 1870

The European Union has in recent weeks come under more scrutiny than ever as the British referendum on membership draws closer. Yet, as Conservatives fight a bitter proxy leadership battle through the respective Remain and Leave campaigns, much hysterical rhetoric has rained down from both sides.

But perhaps one of the most appalling fables has been the comparison of the European Union to the attempted Nazi conquest of the Continent under Adolf Hitler. Boris Johnson, as widely reported, drew this analogy and it has informed the thinking of a good number of Brexiters for some time.

Yet the whole purpose of the EU, from its very conception and no matter how befuddled it has become in its support of multinational big business, was quite the opposite; and perhaps it is our only deeply flawed hope for the Continent remaining at peace. For Johnson and his colleagues' lazy history does deep disservice to the generation that faced the great conflagration that took tens of millions of European and other lives between 1939 and 1945, and to the people who worked to establish a different means for European states to settle their differences.

That we have not had a war between any of the major European nations, or any members of the EU, for over 70 years now is unique to our troubled continent's history. The so-called Pax Europa is unparallelled not only in recent times but in all time. Where there have been conflicts involving member states, such as Britain in the Falklands or France in Algeria (or both in Libya), these have been about their pursuit of national (and corporate) interests outside of Europe.

So, who were the people who set up this project?
The EU has eleven so called Founding Fathers (sadly reflecting their more patriarchal times). None of them could be seen as having any sympathy at all for the ideas of the Nazis; and quite the opposite. In their different ways, each of them either fought or suffered (or both) in the struggle against Hitler's Reich. Politically they ranged from conservative Christian Democrats to Communists.

Here they are along with their respective war records:

Konrad Adenaur (Germany)
Arrested twice by the Nazis and imprisoned following the 1944 July Valkyrie plot (though he was not personally involved in it).

Joseph Bech (Luxemburg)
When Germany invaded in 1940, he escaped to London and later served as Foreign Minister in the Government-in-exile.

Johan Beyen (Netherlands)
After the German invasion, he fled to London and served as a member of the Government-in-exile.

Winston Churchill (United Kingdom)
Well, what can you say? Architect of the war against Hitler, he called for a United States of Europe in 1946 to prevent future wars. In 1948, he was foremost in advocating a European Charter of Human Rights, backed by a European Court, on which the European Convention on Human Rights was later based. It is this which his Tory successors now wish to scrap.

Alcide de Gasperi (Italy)
Headed an anti-fascist group within the PPI predecessor of the Christian Democrats. In 1927, after severe harassment, he was jailed by Mussolini for 4 years - the Vatican negotiated his release when he became seriously ill after 18 months, and he lived inside the Vatican until the overthrow of Mussolini in 1943.

Walter Hallstein (Germany)
He was an academic in Nazi Germany. He declined to join the Party and his appointment to a professorship at Frankfurt was opposed by local Nazi officials (his colleagues prevailed however and he was given the post of Faculty Dean). He was drafted into the army in 1942 but he surrendered to the Americans in 1944 and worked as a teacher in Project Sunflower, an early denazification programme among German prisoners of war.

Sicco Mansholt (Netherlands)
He was a farmer who became an active member of the Dutch Resistance during the Nazi occupation, helping to hide people wanted by the invaders and organising a massive clandestine food programme in the western provinces.

Jean Monnet (France)
In London in 1940, he worked with Churchill on the British PM's proposal for a political and military union with France, which was thwarted by the German invasion that spring. Monnet remained in London as a member of de Gaulle's National Liberation Committee, returning to Paris following the 1944 flight of the Nazis.

Robert Schuman (France)
Resigned from the Reynaud Government in 1940 over its collaborationist stance with the Nazi invaders. He was arrested and, after initially being marked by the Gestapo to be sent to the Dachau concentration camp, was instead imprisoned by the Gauleiter of Occupied France. In 1942, he escaped and joined the French Resistance, speaking at secret meetings to organise political opposition to the Nazis and the Petain regime.

Paul-Henri Spaak (Belgium)
He was Foreign Minister in 1940 when the Germans invaded and conquered Belgium. He fled across France and from there to Portugal, concealed in the false bottom of a truck along with the Prime Minister (Hubert Pierlot) to avoid capture by pro-Hitler Spanish fascists. He reached London and served in the Belgium Government-in-exile.

Alberto Spinelli (Italy)
A Communist writer, in 1927 he was imprisoned for ten years by Mussolini's fascist regime. Then again, in 1940, he was interned with 800 other political prisoners on the island of Ventontene. While there, at great personal risk, he and a fellow anti-fascist prisoner, Ernesto Rossi, wrote a manifesto secretly on cigarette papers concealed in a tin, calling for "A Free and United Europe." This was smuggled out and circulated by the Italian Resistance.
Spinelli himself was released in 1943 and at a clandestine meeting in Milan in August he and others founded the left wing European Federalist Movement. He argued that a new settlement was needed or else Europe would soon see war again.


No one can convincingly argue that the European Union is not deeply flawed, nor that it isn't in trouble. But before Britain rushes to exit, a step where we would almost certainly be just the first of many leavers, do we really want to unravel the whole thing?

Brexiters say we will leave and establish a new relationship with the EU. But what if there is no European Union and instead thirty or forty nation states with nothing to settle their differences but guns and tanks?

We might do well to remind ourselves of the reasons the Founders had for doing what they did, and why, taking a lesson from history, we should not mistake the fury of debate between EU members and the difficulties of joint decision-making for the existential, life-and-death struggles of the not-so-distant past.

Last Brexit to Bullingdon

Bullingdon Boys - Cameron (2nd left back) & Johnson (front right) at Oxford together

 "This is the most important decision Britain will make in a generation," quivered the worried voice of Tory grandee Lord Heseltine on the radio this evening. "But it is turning into something nasty."

The plaintive plea of a serious man, perhaps, but one likely to fall on deaf ears as the European referendum campaign grows ever more shrill.

Remain have deployed the Project Fear tactics of the Scottish referendum (forgetting how that in fact almost lost Scotland from the UK). Unlearning, the Remain camp has choreographed an endless succession of bad Brexit days on what would happen if the Eurovote is to leave the European Union: we will all be £4,000 worse off, we will pay more for our goods, we won't get a trade deal with the USA, we will lose influence, European scientists won't talk to British scientists any more, and, today, according to Prime Minister Cameron, the bloodthirsty terrorist leader of Daesh will apparently be delighted if Britain opts for Brexit.

So far, so fear.

Brexit are no better however: we are long used to Farage and Co proclaiming the imminent death of Britain as more Bulgarians and Romanians than actually exist allegedly prepare to decant to Margate. But now we are also told by the increasingly hysterical Boris Johnson that the EU is in fact the realisation of Napoleonic and Nazi dreams of conquest (although curiously he seems to applaud the Roman invasions) and now today he has claimed Cameron has been bribing business leaders to support Remain in return for public contracts.

So what are we seeing here?

Just two men define the debate: David Cameron and Boris Johnson.

All along, the referendum has been David Cameron's high-risk tactic for managing his party. Aware of how Euroscepticism and "bastards" round the Cabinet table did for the last Tory PM, John Major, his offer of a referendum was only ever designed to rally his own dissidents and take the sting out of the rising UKIP. But, now that the time is here, the real reason for this national vote is as clear as crystal. The debate they really care about isn't Europe, but rather who will be Cameron's successor?

Boris Johnson supported remaining in the EU until over a weekend in February he decided to campaign to leave, largely to give him a platform to promote himself to succeed Cameron as leader and PM when the latter stands down, as he has pledged to do sometime before 2020. Similarly wearing his convictions lightly, Cameron reportedly prepared two articles for publication, one for staying and one for leaving, until he assessed his chances (and those of his friend and desired successor George Osborne) after the concluded his notional negotiations with other EU leaders.

So now, instead of a meaningful debate of the merits and possibilities of In or Out, their shrill, personalised and ever more ridiculous baiting of each other exposes not only the immature level of their European debate, but also the truly nasty natures of both men. This should be of little surprise, of course.

These men were contemporaries at Eton and in the infamous Bullingdon Club at Oxford University. The latter institution, which takes stipends rumoured to be up to £10,000 pa from each member, distinguishes itself with schoolboy rituals, such as smashing up the rooms of new members, holding an annual breakfast involving such excess that each person is given a sick bag to allow them to vomit without leaving table and, allegedly, burning money in front of a homeless person.

Our protagonists were no exceptions. Boris Johnson's biographer notes:
"I don't think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men."  Meanwhile Cameron has reminisced fondly that,“Things got out of hand and we'd had a few drinks. We smashed the place up and Boris set fire to the toilets.”

These men are bullies. They have grown up in a culture where self-entitlement and bullying (thinly disguised as upper-class joshing) are de rigeur. It has shown in how Cameron has run a Government targeting the vulnerable with his relentless austerity economics and in how Johnson allegedly ran City Hall via eclectic demands for half-baked ideas to be implemented and then growing angry with those who failed him.

Both men have tried hard to cultivate more positive self-images - Cameron as a regular family guy, Johnson as a happy buffoon on a bike. All too often their masks have slipped for a moment - such as when Cameron described a handful of desperate refugees as a "swarm", like human insects; and Johnson when he screamed abuse at a taxi driver for no reason other than his own pomposity. But of course, there is nothing as bitterly vitriolic or fascinatingly unpleasant than two former allies scrapping jealously with each other. Whatever the outcome of the Eurovote, the medium term future not only of both men but of their party and its Government must now be in serious doubt. We can but live in hope.

In the meantime, however, we will have been required to make a major decision on our national future with the arguments mired in mutual loathing between different wings of the Tory Party. It is to be hoped that in the weeks remaining more sensible voices, on all sides, can come to the fore and debate the issues without the distraction of either of these smug egotists.

Let them go back to Bullingdon, shout bullshit at each other and vomit together. Then the rest of us can get on with the grown up stuff. Like deciding the future of our country and Continent.

Sleepwalking the EU

 
The European Union referendum debate is sputtering slowly towards half-life. Still largely framed as a debate between two parts of the Tory Party, with echoing accompaniment from their familiars in UKIP and the remnants of the Lib Dems, it has to be so far the most turgid, depressive experience in recent political history. None of the aspiration and joy, or even the passion and anger, of the Scottish referendum or the US elections. Just a bunch of men in suits, accompanied by the odd woman in a suit, trying to outdo each other with predictions of our imminent demise if we leave, or if we stay.

In the Scottish referendum, the so-called Project Fear, where the Westminster parties combined to try to scare Scots into opposing independence, so insulted voters that there was a huge swing against remaining in the UK. In the final six weeks, support for independence grew by about 50% and the final result was infinitely closer than expected.

Bizarrely, the same parties that instigated the negative campaigning in Scotland have now adopted the same tactics for the Eurovote - the big difference being that this time it is being used by both sides. Consider tonight's Guardian debate which pitched Labour's Alan Johnson and Lib Dem Nick Clegg for "Remain" against UKIP's Nigel Farage and the Tory Alison Leadsom for "Leave".

The messaging was as appalling as the last few weeks' worst:

- Brexit will justify the break up of the UK with a new Scottish referendum (Johnson)
- The UK Government won't allow the Scots to have another vote (Leadsom)
- Britain's security is at threat if we don't leave because of a combination of a European Army and poverty-stricken Turkey being allowed to join (Farage)
- Nigel Farage is "deeply, deeply dishonest" (Clegg)
- Nick Clegg has made a living out of telling lies (Farage)

Even the options on the paper - Remain or Leave - are somehow uninspiring. Should I remain or should I leave?  as the song never went.

The polls are bouncing around, and this is not surprising - voters are unclear of the issues because the politicians and the media are so used to simply printing and echoing horror stories about abroad that there is little ability to have any informed debate. The most progressive elements of the Remain camp, especially the trade unions, talk about the EU granting workers rights, and this is correct in the sense that a lot of employment law such as equal pay, anti-discrimination and health and safety rules is derived from EU regulations and directives.

However, implicit in the agreement signed up to by Cameron is an even greater ability than before for Britain to opt-out of many of these (as we have already over swathes of the working time regulations, for example) as well as a commitment to sign up to the appalling TransAtlantic Trade & Investment Partnership treaty (TTIP). Both provisions significantly threaten the rights we have gained.

But on the Leave side there is equal dishonesty - they say we can leave and have a trade agreement with the EU which will somehow inevitably continue to trade with us, ignoring the fact that, as with all trade agreements, we would need to sign up to many of the same rules we apparently detest now but without having any say in them at all. Norway even pays billions a year to the EU for the privilege of trading with it while not a member.

Neither side to date has either given a compelling argument. The remain side largely ignores the positives - such as the record-breaking length of time the Continent that started two world wars has now enjoyed peace; we may haggle over budgets but no one is shooting at each other. Or the fact that freedom of movement has allowed millions of Britons to live in the EU as well as permitted Europeans to come to Britain. Some half million UK pensioners live in Spain and enjoy its free health service as a right. Similarly, the urgent international action required to tackle global warming has a headstart with an international institution like the EU acting as a springboard for action.

Equally, the Leave side could talk about Britain out of the EU developing more localised economies and strengthening rather than diluting workers and consumers rights - except that its leaders are pretty hostile to these things and detest the minimal rules the EU requires now.

So, in the coming weeks, it has to be hoped that the campaigns improve, lift their sights and provide some vision of the future that might get people along to vote - and more than that, think about the future. The Scottish referendum was noted for its massive engagement of people, on both sides, in an unprecedented way. But as things stand, it is not impossible that the biggest group in the EU vote will be the non-voters and, whatever the result of the ballot, the issue will remain unsettled.

Corbyn's Labour Party is silent as it increasingly turns inward. The Greens, by contrast, have produced a fairly optimistic video in support of remaining, though perhaps they could be doing a bit more to talk about the sort of EU they would like to build rather than fairly uncritically lauding the pretty messy and undemocratic structures we have now. The SNP's Nicola Sturgeon, meantime, has been a constructive voice for a more informed debate, but even she is talking more about the benefits of the status quo than what needs to change to benefit citizens' rather than big business interests.

Sleepwalking in or out of the European Union may not be the issue - the neoliberals and the banks remain the winners. The issue, as ever, is how we break past them and start to build a new, fairer, sustainable society - nationally and internationally. The different Europe of Varoufakis, not the corporate straight-jacket of Cameron, or Farage.

Saturn Eats His Own: Winter Has Come to Europe

"There was once a dream that was Rome, you could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish. It was so fragile and I fear that it will not survive the winter."

The fictitious (as far as we know) words of Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Ridley Scott's 2000 film Gladiator. The aged philosopher-king was bewailing the slide of the ideals of the Roman Republic into the hands of greedy and corrupt nobles and politicians.

It was perhaps  an apt movie to emerge in the Millennium Days. Alongside a decade long boom sustained unsustainably on the debts of the poor, the 2000s saw the rise of the Euro, the international currency adopted by 19 of the 28 member states of the European Union - the first such since Marcus Aurelius' Imperium introduced the denarii as the single currency from Bagdhad to Newcastle. It would of course have been 20 states had Tony Blair and Nick Clegg had their way - but we have old prudence himself, Chancellor Gordon Brown, to thank for keeping the UK out. He was content to hand us over instead to the deregulated City financiers in London and our Eurozone membership (as distinct from our EU membership) was kept on indefinite hold.

The Euro was  seen as a huge step forward in the "ever closer union" of Europe. A single unit of exchange, binding economies as diverse in size, social objectives and wealth distribution as Germany and France, Portugal and Cyprus and several of the until recently Communist states of eastern Europe. This would be Europe's dollar, a standard to solidify the Continent's economic power around so that it could compete equally with the declining USA and more importantly the rising superpowers of China and India.

Basic economics however cautioned from the outset against any such optimism. With such a wide range of economies, the Euro would always struggle between rich and poor, between Governments keen to intervene and influence economies to the benefit of their citizens and those favouring laissez-faire market economics. As with the entire banking sector, it was and remains adherents of the second type who control the European Central Bank, the major economies of the EU and the IMF. Consequently, their view has repeatedly prevailed in terms of Eurozone policy.

The impact of this has been manifest on the smaller, poorer economies of the southern states. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and Greece have all struggled. As members of the Eurozone, unlike the UK, they have ceded their fiscal autonomy to the ECB. Whereas in the past they could print or borrow money in their own right, now they are at the behest of the ECB and when it is committed to austerity and market economics, they have in the end no choice but to comply, regardless of the consequences on their societies.

And so we see this week, the rich states of the north combining under the ultimate neoliberal standard bearer of Angela Merkel to "waterboard" (as one EU official gleefully put it) the Greek Prime Minister into surrendering huge swathes of his nation's wealth to privatisation and at the same time increasing sales tax and cutting pensions, both measures which will directly harm millions of the poorest Greeks. The EU will put up tens of billions of Euros in bailout money, but this will go to pay Greece's debts to German and other EU banks, not to aiding any recovery in the Greek economy.

The corporate thieves in charge of the EU have had their way: a democratically elected left wing government, having had the temerity to stand up to the bully boys of the neoliberal establishment, has had the legs cut from under it. Already, they are looking to install a rightwing regime in spite of the conservative Nea Demokratia's trouncing at the polls. Syriza, once the hope of hundreds of millions across Europe, is now divided and its party banners set on fire by former supporters on the streets of Athens this evening. Spain has been duly served a warning should it be so impertinent as to vote for the wrong people and elect Podemos in its elections in November.

So what remains of the great European Ideal?

Established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957, once it was to establish a harmonious, prosperous union across a Continent previously riven by endless centuries of war, almost since the days of Marcus Aurelius himself. Alongside a single market, social programmes would share wealth and protect ordinary people from big business taking advantage of them. Employment laws, health and safety standards, environmental protection, social benefits and consumer rights would be equalised so that citizens were empowered. The European Parliament would speak for them and a democratic family of nations would flourish, a beacon in a troubled world.

How far removed from that we are tonight. The dream has become a nightmare as policy imposes real hardship - hunger, homelessness and despair - on European citizens. The suicide rate has risen sharply in Greece with one university professor so distressed that he died by setting fire to himself in Syntagma Square in a desperate plea to the European leaders to give relief to his nation. But he was of no consequence to the psychopaths in suits.

In the UK, we face a referendum on whether or not to remain in the European Union, possibly as early as next autumn and by 2017 at the latest. The Cameron Government is posturing that it will get a new deal for Britain in Europe - one which, for all the rhetoric, will simply strengthen the power of the rich over the poor in the our country. For Cameron plans to get opt outs on the limited protections in the workplace that the EU even now does guarantee - against long hours, against discrimination and in favour of some basic employee consultation on matters such as redundancy. These are the things the Farage and Cameron want to remove: they will be quite happy for big business to continue to rob the taxpayer and profit from workers and customers alike.

Because of this, Greens and many others on the Left have to widely varying degrees of enthusiasm (or reluctance) favoured staying in the EU. But now, as we see the European Union's mask slipping and its mouth gaping like Saturn's rictus as he devoured his own, it is time to think again.

We share none of UKIP's anti-migrant agenda and so we hesitate to stand on the "Brexit" side of the debate. But ask ourselves, when we talk of a social Europe, where is it? And what possible prospect is there that we will ever see it?

Goya's Saturn, god of Rome, eating his children

Is an institution that not only abandons but actively preys on the weakest, an institution whose Ideal seems more wedded to economic eugenics than democracy, an institution that ransacks the common wealth of an impoverished society - is it really one that we can campaign to remain part of? For what possible reason?

The European Parliament, perhaps the one crumb of progressive hope in the whole rotten edifice, is as emasculated as ever. We have seen this with the secrecy around the TTIP negotiations - yet another measure that is about to offer all of us up to the wolves of Wall Street and their global buddies.Why would any socialist, progressive, Green or human being wish to continue to be part of it?

I write this with much sadness. All my life I have dreamt of a genuine European confederation, a union of equal nations and equal peoples, finally putting aside the conflicts of the past. Our Continent, for all its claims of birthing democracy and industry, has also been the locus and cause of the worst wars by far in human history. If there was ever to be any prospect of ending that appalling cycle, perhaps the "ever closer union" that was the European dream would have provided it.

But with Greece now probably on the precipice of social conflict akin to the break up of Yugoslavia and several other states facing similar fates, such a Europe is, as perhaps it always was, a dream. In its place, we face instead the nightmare of neoliberalism run amok.

We can play no part in it. What we seek is not on offer. If we are to ever show another way, another Europe and one day another world, is possible, perhaps we do indeed need to leave this Guild of Thieves.

Greece: A Vote for All of Us

Greece has voted decisively to reject the latest demands from the European Union for austerity economics.

The Hellenic people have today dealt a huge blow for all Europeans against the corporate interests that over the last 8 years have foisted the political choice of austerity economics across the Continent. The 60%-plus vote to reject the latest demands for massive cuts in public services and welfare to the poorest represents a major victory in the struggle to reverse the "mainstream" view that the monetarism first adopted by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s should be the default form of orthodox economics. It is a massive vote of confidence in the Syriza government and the stewardship of Prime Minister Tsipras and Finance Minister Varoufakis, but it leaves huge questions for them to tackle in terms of next steps. For although Greece has spoken loudly and clearly, the anti-democratic forces in the European Central Bank and the IMF, backed by the neoliberalism of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are unlikely to deviate from their obsession with reducing the public sector and increasing the wealth of the rich across the Eurozone. The economics of austerity will not go quietly or quickly.

This is a particularly pernicious form of political economy - it holds that balanced budgets are key for governments, whose involvement in society should rarely extend beyond basic policing and the military (although in practice it actually extends to providing subsidies and  handouts to the big corporations that fund our political masters, either via bailouts viz the banking system or "private finance initiatives" and outsourcing of services such as health and education at criminally high costs to the taxpayer).

Syriza's Varoufakis and Tsipras

 In this scenario, there is a fetish about reducing the deficit even when sucking money (and demand) out of a becalmed economy will simply lead to a downward spiral with huge costs to the lives of ordinary people. Its proponents however claim that, in the long-run, a harmonious equilibrium of supply and demand will be reached - although this is somewhat incredulously to be determined by the mystical invisible hand of the market rather than any socially-conscious intervention by humans. We are to serve economics, it seems, not the other way round.

The counterpoise to this - the investment-led approach of Keynesian economics - is somewhat more humane (albeit not necessarily an exclusively socialist response). It sees social objectives, primarily the minimisation of unemployment, as a key objective. Here, Governments will borrow or even just print new money to keep demand going in the economy, keeping activity moving so that people stay in work - this reduces the cost of out of work welfare and increases tax take, so that in time, if useful, the deficit can be reduced or eliminated without ruining the lives of ordinary people. As Keynes said of those who would leave things for the market to somehow work things out in the longrun, "In the long run, we are all dead." Economics should serve society; social objectives should be their sole purpose, not the enrichment of an ever -smaller circle of owners and shareholders.

However, the neoliberal elite who came to dominate our political landscape as well as the economy during and since the 1980s have made several key changes that undermine the potential for investment-led economics. They removed many of the controls on money and globalised the movement of capital; and they gave banks the right to create new money out of nothing - a ludicrous and highly dangerous arrangement that led to the 2008 crisis and continues to this day.

And into the midst of this, although Britain is outside it, the Eurozone came into being and countries like Greece surrendered their economic and monetary independence to the European Central Bank. This now determines the economic policies not only of Greece but in effect all Eurozone states. And with its decisions in the hands of austerity-obsessed bankers whose sole objective has been to increase the power and wealth of the elite, the social needs of the poor in Greece, or Spain or even Germany have been of no concern. Hence their belief that Greece should cut and cut and cut and simply keep on bleeding.

In this context, we have seen Greece previously be forced to accept an unelected Prime Minister to impose the diktats of the ECB on its people. This was being openly contemplated again in Berlin last week as Merkel and her gang felt bullish about a Yes vote in the referendum cutting the legs from under the elected Syriza government. This is the same mindset that reportedly led to some bankers allegedly opening a book on whether or not there might be a military coup d'etat to "solve" their problems with the irritant of democratically elected Greek politicians not going along with inflicting ever more misery on their people.

Greece has said no to the austerity that is at the cold heart of Europe now. But the only real option for the Hellenic democracy is to now leave the Eurozone as quickly as possible. With the drachma restored, they would be free to adopt an investment-led recovery, restore their battered public services and revive their economy. In doing this, they would be leading the way for democratic forces across Europe to rise and turn our fractured societies away from the austerity that has left Britons to choose between heating and eating, Spaniards to watch their health services crumble and youth unemployment soar, and Greeks to see their country unravel around them, their young and their rich taking flight abroad.

For some of us on the progressive left in Britain, until now reluctant supporters of the European Union as at least some form of minimal defence against the corporatocracy, the treatment of Greece (and of Portugal, Spain and Italy) demands we revisit our views ahead of the British referendum. The Europe we seek, one that puts people and planet before the profit of big companies and the demands of our elite, is not on offer.

It may feel uncomfortable to be on the same side of the fence as the likes of UKIP, but is it any easier standing alongside the three pro-EU, pro-TTIP, pro-austerity parties coalesced under David Cameron? At the very least, the debate must be had - why should any progressive wish us to remain part of this "ever closer union" that would willingly, even enthusiastically, destroy one of its own? Can this project be saved from itself? How do we get a social Europe genuinely on the agenda? Or do we need to break away to come back together in something more constructive and sustainable?

The No vote for the Hellenes is no negative result. It is a terrifying but optimistic vote that says society must be for everyone. That the collective need, the common good, must come before the apologists of robber-capitalism who hold power in the boardroom, banks and Cabinet offices in capitals across the European Union (including London). It is a line in the sand, but will need to be the first of many.

It is a vote for a future that is about people, not profits.

From the birthplace of democracy, it is a vote for all of us.

Athens was the birthplace of European democracy: this ballot said "No" to Themistocles in a vote 2,400 years ago.