Corbyn and the EU: the Clock is Ticking

The last week has seen the fissures in the Conservative Party rent open for all to see more clearly than ever. With Cabinet Ministers falling like nine-pins in what can only be assumed were well-rehearsed tantrums (even the man who wrote the deal was among those who denounced it and resigned!), Theresa May's Coalition of the Damned seemed on the brink of collapse. Opponents inside and outside ranks circled like vultures over an bloodied prairie dog, while the media salivated over a fresh delivery of meat for their 24 hour newsfeast. Even Labour's Jeremy Corbyn mused that he could muster a little sympathy for the Prime Minister on a personal level - though someone might remind Gentle Jezzer that she was of course the Home Secretary who led on inventing the "hostile environment" for migrants, so any empathy might be better directed elsewhere.

Yet, while May is on the ropes and anyone watching must wonder what she does get out of it for herself, the fact is that she will almost certainly still be PM in 6 months time (just) and the Tories will still be in Government with their DUP Orcs snapping loudly but loyal on the benches behind them. The Tories are masters of survival and this time is no exception - their incumbency entrenched by Nick Clegg's typically short-sighted Fixed-Term Parliaments Act, which means that over 100 Tory turkeys would need to vote for Christmas before there can be a new General Election this side of 2022.

We hear that five Government Ministers - yes, there are still that many left - led by the weasel-minded Michael Gove are sticking with Theresa May to persuade her to amend the deal. This would entail both May and the EU being prepared to renegotiate, which is unlikely in both camps. So that leaves two scenarios: either one where the Rees-Moggs and Boris Johnsons suddenly fall into line, which will simply not happen; or, more likely, the deal is scrapped and the Tories and DUP unite around a situation where May signs up to numerous piecemeal arrangements for things like customs checks and air travel before a"Hard Brexit" at the end of March 2019.

This will not be the apocalypse that so many Hard Remainers claim: we will not fall back to eating grass flavoured with the last packets of stockpiled bisto, though without question there will be many administrative problems and disruption especially to transport for several weeks or months.

What we will have is a Conservative regime though that will use the chaos to enact all manner of contingency legislation and regulations to dismantle a swathe of employment and consumer rights, privatise yet more or the state and possibly repress some of its opponents in the name of National Unity. May, her job done (she will say) will resign in May and Gove's hour will arrive.

Unless....

There is, in the next few weeks, a wide open chance for Jeremy Corbyn and Labour to drive not just a wedge between the Tories, but a stake into the heart of the Government. It would involve neither a General Election nor a second referendum.

What if Keir Starmer were to announce that, on reflection, while May's Deal doesn't meet Labour's six tests, the party recognises that, in the short time left, it is the best deal available and the only one that will both honour the referendum result and afford some protection to workers and consumers?

Doing this, rescuing May's deal, possibly with a few amendments, would leave the Prime Minister prisoner of Labour and drive Mogg and co out either to foment ceaseless rebellion within the Tories or alternatively to the netherworld of UKIP - whose own revival, now gaining some traction in the polls where they are back in third place though on just 8%, would also be spiked. May might linger on longer at Downing Street, but her government would be paralysed and the time would come when even she would know the game was up and support an early General Election. Labour would be in pole-position to dictate the terms of the ongoing negotiations for our new trading relationship with the EU (bear in mind that the current deal is only about how we leave, not the future arrangements) and by reaching out across the political divide would be seen a force for unity in this divisive time.

Politics is the art of the possible. And while all acts should always be guided by deep-rooted principle, much of the hot air of the last few days has not been for the sake of beliefs and ideals, but simply jostling for personal and/or party gain at what is one of the most critical moments for the UK since we joined the EEC back in 1973.

The electorate, on the other hand, seek simply a settlement: for now, none of the uncompromising politicians parading before the cameras this last week are likely to have infused anyone with what is needed above all - hope. Corbyn alone has the chance to do so, but the clock is ticking.

We're Leaving Europe : Now The Struggle Has Come Home

I campaigned and voted Remain. Most of my political comrades and colleagues did so too.

But the UK did not. By over 1.2 million votes, the decision is to leave.

Among my cohort, to varying degrees, people are disappointed and, in a number of cases though not all, surprised. What will it mean? After all, some of the predictions, on both sides, about the consequences of the outcome were so apocalyptic - if we are leaving Europe, where are we going? America? China? It is after all just a month ago that David Cameron said Brexit would be celebrated by Daesh/ISIS  - what now if that really was the case?

The shamelessly hyperbolic nature of the Tory-led campaigns by both the official camps have predictably provoked extreme reactions, at least in emotional terms. While a small minority of pro-Brexit racists have used the result to validate an appalling surge in hate crimes from verbal abuse through to firebombing a halal butcher's shop, somewhat more peacefully the Remain side has seen an outpouring of grief and angry disbelief - clearly, the people who voted for Brexit were misguided, confused, lied to, racists or, even, OLD!

Genuinely distraught young people interviewed in the street declared their future stolen by people who, by their chronological reckoning, will be dead soon. One viral video showed a woman burst into tears under the misapprehension that she would no longer have a Nandos restaurant nearby, while another was recorded complaining she will now need to pay to travel to France (?). Ignorance aplenty there has been - but far from exclusive to one side.

And ignorance of a dangerous type has crept into the Remain narrative in the last few days: that if enough sign online petitions for retrospective legislation and complain in the street that the result is wrong, well, we can rerun the referendum until people get it right and vote to stay. Or maybe, as it was just an advisory referendum, the House of Commons can vote to throw the result out. One constitutional expert has declared, in tortuous language, that 52-48 is somehow a draw, while others claim that it may not be legal to leave because of provisions in the European Communities Act from 1972 that bar the Prime Minister from activating the Article 50 notice clause.

Yet these all miss the point and the real challenge confronting us now : the majority voted to Leave. However unpalatable, however difficult, risky and even dangerous, in a democracy, we need to honour that.  Obscure legalism in frustration of the popular will has been and will again be the death-knell of a constitutional liberalism that sees voting as nothing more than the masses' periodic and humble ratification of the elite's right to rule. Overturn this referendum and first and foremost you will simply imperil even further what little social peace remains.

Rather than try to quash the vote, the task now is to look at why people choose to vote the way they did. Survey after survey confirms why, and confirms what anyone involved at any level of political activity over the last decade can tell you - immigration was and is the number one issue. It drove millions to the polls to vote Leave and the Left and others who voted Remain ignore this at great cost.

While probably every racist in the country voted to Leave, they were a small minority among those who crossed that box on the ballot paper. Most Leavers are not racist - but they are disaffected, disempowered and normally disenfranchised. That they felt the EU was responsible for a lot of how they feel is unsurprising given the years of relentless propaganda by the mass media that it is responsible for just about every ill imaginable - validated in full by political leaders including David Cameron casting the EU as the villain in every domestic political game they played.

 We can and must remove the perception that immigration and minority communities are the cause of distress among the poorer sections of society and instead point the finger firmly where the true reason sits - with the rich and powerful who have made this, the sixth richest country in the world, the second most unequal on the planet, behind only the USA. We need to show how it is the impact of unregulated globalism, the impact of worldwide capitalist forces, that have damaged communities and marginalised so many people in our own towns and cities. These are forces that exist in or out of the EU and are fostered by the likes of the Tories and their funders as well as being at the heart of UKIP's worldview.

So now, rather than yet again work for the political system to turn its back on the roar of the disenfranchised and isolated, we need to do two things:

1. Work for the best post-Brexit arrangements possible so that we retain the social and employment protections conferred by the EU; and so that we continue the irreplaceable international environmental work done by the EU with Britain as part of it. There may conceivably at one stage be a case for a referendum on the final settlement, but the practicalities make this less rather than more likely. The EU itself has signalled that the Brexit negotiations will be about just that - exit - rather than what comes after. It seems we will be gone before we know what will come after.

So, rather than imagine there will be either another referendum or a snap General Election - there almost certainly will be neither - we need now to campaign for a withdrawal settlement that keeps these protections and avoids what is already happening in the business press, where influential people are fullsomely calling for the ending of the working time regulations, parental leave and anti-discrimination regulations.

2. Ensure disempowered communities and groups are brought fully into the political struggle and debate. The most effective way this has started to happen has been through the Corbyn leadership of Labour, and it is a major factor in the plotters of the coup against him acting now.

And to do this, we must speak again the language of socialism, not liberalism; of equality and internationalism, not the lies of Blair-lite. It is the poorest and most vulnerable who showed their anger and disaffection most in this vote. It is also they who will likely suffer first and most from Brexit. The Left needs to develop real, positive answers with not for them and ensure their voices are heard, or there will only be ever more scapegoating of minorities and a spiral downwards towards really dark times. A priority must be to bring together those in migrant communities now in many cases deeply scared for their post-Brexit future with those who voted for Brexit, to foster a common agenda for a fairer, inclusive and more equal society - the opposite of what the Tory Brexiteers have in their sights for us.

Scotland will almost certainly leave the UK in the next few years, making the electoral mathematics for progressives in England and Wales that bit harder, but not impossible. Greens have called in the last week for a progressive alliance to take on the Tories at the 2020 election. There are many pitfalls and uncertainties to whether and how this could work, but this should now become the priority for all Remainers of a left of centre and leftwing political viewpoint:  however difficult or even sad, we are leaving Europe; now the struggle has come home.

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)

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.

Godwin's Downfall - Boris Johnson, Or The Historian Who Should Know Better

There is in social media a term called "Godwin's Law", which asserts that anyone with a tenuous or false observation to make on the internet will eventualy invoke Adolf Hitler.

We've had two former London Mayors cite the Austrian Corporal in the last two weeks:

Labour's Ken Livingstone ended up suspended by the party after extrapolating from an arrangement permitted by the German Fuhrer to let Jews leaving Nazi Germany in late 1933 go to Palestine as meaning Hitler endorsed the Zionist belief in a Jewish State. While the Havaara accord is undeniably historical (if short lived), the claimed Zionist intentions of the author of the virulently anti-Semitic Mein Kampf were rather more dubious.

And now, this weekend, Ken's successor, Boris Johnson, less than a week after leaving office, has derided the European Union as being akin to Hitler's Nazi project to conquer Europe. In a lazy attack, the Brexit leader compared the EU bureaucracy to the Napoleonic and Nazi wars of conquest, indulging in cheap rhetoric and ignoring key aspects of history which he is more than well acquainted with.

For Johnson is a historian and is more than aware that the genesis of the European Union was one of ensuring peace and reconstruction after the end of the devastating Second World War. Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime Prime Minister, called in 1946 for a United States of Europe to ensure the reconstruction of the European family - whether he wanted Britain to be part of it or not is open to debate, but it makes the EU hardly the pursuit of a Nazi dream as Johnson has so crassly claimed. Indeed, most of the founders of the EU were people who had actively resisted Hitler and Mussolini or been persecuted and imprisoned by them, the like of which Mr Johnson has had the historically unusual good fortune never to have experienced. Several of the eleven so-called Founding Fathers were resistance fighters, while others were arrested and one fled Nazi-occupied France concealed in the false bottom of a truck.

So it is a travesty of the truth for Johnson to compare the European project with the dictatorships of the jackbooted militarists - all the more so as it is the Nazis' own spiritual heirs in the growing neo-fascist and far right movements who are keenest of all to destroy the European Union.

If Britain leaves, the likes of Le Pen and the AfD will see that as the first of many dominoes to fall until the whole Union is undone and we return to dozens of nation states peering suspiciously at each other over reinforced borders. If this is what Johnson wants from his call for British voters to be "heroes of Europe" (like something out of a bad 1960s war movie), he should know better.

For as a historian, Johnson will also be more than aware that we have never before now had over 70 years without a large-scale war on the European Continent. To be sure, there have been bloody localised conflicts in former Yugoslavia and in Ukraine and parts of the Caucasus (all outside of the EU), but for the first time in history there has been no major war blighting our previously blood-soaked part of the world. Go back, as Mr Johnson curiously does, to the glorious days of authoritarian Imperial Rome, which he does for some reason seem to laud as a "golden age", and not only under that Empire but in every subsequent century you can find not one or two but dozens of large scale military conflicts between European states. That is until 1945, and the new emphasis on a Europe that shares its future rather than fights over it.

Has the EU realised that future?

The simple answer is No, of course not. The EU is beholden to big business interests. It is not sufficiently democratic and in some respects, especially in the Eurozone which Britain is not part of, it is over-centralised and obsessed with austerity economics (like our own Government). But that is a case for staying in and making it change; it is not a case for deriding it as the realisation of a one-balled bloodthirsty narcissist's dream and walking away to do deals with these nice democrats in Beijing and shake hands with President Trump.

On so many issues - tackling climate change, taming big multinational corporations, keeping the social and political peace on our fractured Continent - a democratised EU is essential. Leaving it won't somehow magic an alternative into being. We need to campaign, argue, push for change. And if in the meantime we argue ceaselessly with other Europeans, well, equally we will work with many others too, and in any case, surely shouting is better than shooting?

Mr Johnson, as changeable as his spliced-at-conception twin Trump, should take his tawdry careerism elsewhere and leave history alone.

Nexit Nightmare : Premier Johnson and President Trump?