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. 

Police Alert: Nick Clegg for Wasting Time

And so the Police & Crime Commissioners elections roar into the record books: as the ones with the lowest turnout in modern British history. With less than 15% of the electorate voting - and one polling station in Wales having a remarkable turnout of precisely zero - the validity of the entire process has fallen into question. Record numbers of spolit papers - many deliberately so - have turned up as the citizens of England and Wales give, in effect, a decisive thumbs down to the whole farcical process.

Over £100 million of taxpayers' money has been wasted on holding this exercise in the middle of November - totally out of time with the normal voting cycle in early winter, in the dark. An additional £25 million was wasted on moving it from the original plan of coinciding with the local elections in May.

So who is responsible for this mess? Who has wasted taxpayers money and a lot of people's time? And left us with the policing system in a total mess with Commissioners formally elected but without any mandate or legitimacy at all?

Step forward our old friend, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancer in Chief Nick Clegg.

Yes, that one - whose Lib Dem Party sunk into fifth place behind UKIP and the English Democrats in Nick's own home territory of South Yorkshire, only just keeping their deposit. As brazen as ever, the Lib Dems pushed and pushed for these elections to be held in mid-November rather than the previously agreed time of May when their costs could have been reduced and (whatever your view about the posts themselves) more voters would have participated.

Why?

Quite simply, though laughably, they thought this would help them hold seats at the council elections As the BBC trailed a year ago, Lib Dem high command thought that if the police elections were held in May, they would both distract Lib Dem efforts to hold onto council seats contested at the same time and buoy up the Tory vote by creating a focus on law and order.

So, after confronting David Cameron with threats to vote down the Police & Social Responsibility Bill if he did not concede on the timetable, the Lib Dems achieved the change and, in spite of the additional £25 millions in  costs, the vote was moved to yesterday. At the time, they claimed it was an altruistic move to depoliticise the elections, but a BBC investigation found otherwise - and unlike the recent Newsnight farago, no one denied this one's findings. And besides, the refusal to provide a freepost facility as normal with this level of election effectively removed the chance for independents to seriously participate unless they were wealthy - leading in fact to very highly politicised elections.

It is therefore touchingly and wonderfully ironic that the Lib Dems' results have been relentlessly pisspoor - not only did they fail to field candidates in half the country, but where they did they were frequently beaten out of sight. With most results in, their national vote total barely reaches 7% and they have been overtaken by UKIP even although that party was also only standing in half the contests.

Clegg and his party have a lot to answer for - and a big bill to pay.

Umm..err...umm..oh, gosh.....it wasn't me, officer!

Et Tu, Davey?

Cassius Cable and  Praetorian Davey - yond men hath a lean and hungry look! 

Nick Clegg's beleaguered Lib Dems gather in Green Party-run Brighton this week for their annual Federal Party Conference, their third since they entered the Coalition Government with the Tories and began to implement perhaps the most right wing fiscal and social reform agenda in British history - much to the chagrin of many of their members and the likely permanent alienation of swathes of their former voters.

Clegg's personal ratings are at an all-time low and the party's have plunged by two-thirds since the 2010 election - today, two opinion polls (Opinium & Survations) have them on just 8% and 10% of popular support, in fourth place nationally behind the UK Independence Party - others are a little kinder, but still show UKIP breathing down the Lib Dems necks close enough to raise the hackles of fear. With hundreds of councillors culled at the local elections last May and more losses likely in spring 2013, Clegg's own position is increasingly rumoured to be at risk, at least in the longer-run. As leading pollster Peter Kellner of YouGov has warned, on current trends, the party will lose 80% of its MPs in the 2015 election.

For now, the party rank-and-file have shown an almost lemming-like willingness to follow Clegg over the cliff, but cracks are beginning to show as the leader's desperate strategy of trying to emphasise differences with his Tory partners fails to make any electoral impact. Likewise his attempt to apologise for voting to raise student fees in full defiance of a pledge to vote against any such thing (note, "vote against" - whether in Government or not) has fallen on deaf ears.

Mr Clegg is facing two potential challengers - interestingly both from former SDP members who may be seen to represent a slightly less full-on charge to the right by Clegg and his Orange Book ally David Laws (now returned to the Cabinet table in a rather odd arrangement as he is not a full-member).

The first is the Secretary of State for Business and Enterprise, Vince Cable. Cable, a former apologist for the Shell Oil company, has enacted some pretty right wing changes to employment law while in office, but he still laughingly tries to pass himself off as the "Marx of the Lib Dems" - though he could do with clarifying whether he means Karl or Groucho. His hubris is boundless, and fuelled by a finding that Lib Dem ratings could soar to as high as..12%!, he has told the Sunday Times that he does not rule out being leader of the party - one day. Soon, we might imagine him whisper under his impatient breath.

The other rumoured challenger is Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary. He is closer to Clegg politically, but views himself as a credible challenger to Cable. The Mail on Sunday produced an article today covering his ambitions to succeed Clegg. On Channel 4 News this evening, he hotly denied the article's veracity - he is, he claimed "one of the Praetorian Guard surrounding Nick Clegg".

Now, Mr Davey could either be being opaquely clever here or alternatively betraying his lack of historical knowledge: for over two and a half centuries, the Praetorians were the bodyguards of the Roman Emperors. So he might be suggesting that he would take a political bullet for Emperor Cleggie, so deep is his belief in him. Alternatively, given the Praetorians' propensity for bumping off Emperors (on one occasion even putting the throne up for auction), he could instead be giving a coded signal that he may bury the knife in Caesar's shoulder-blades any day soon. Notably, when invited several times by the C4 interviewer, Davey repeatedly avoided saying "No" to the question of whether he wants to be leader.

Either way, the third-going-on-fourth party, faces a dismal time ahead - yet doggedly still clinging to the belief that nuanced changes to party pronouncements (the latest being that parents can use their pensions towards their kids mortgages!) will somehow win their lost legions of followers back. If Vince Cable is all their "left-wing" has to offer, they may as well shut up shop and follow their National Liberal ancestors in the smothering bosom of their Tory Masters.

A third candidate for the leadership is rumoured to be Lurcio, currently the MP for Westmoreland and Lonsdale. Oh don't ye titter!

The Government: An Apology...

The Government - an apology.

Yes, it is an apology...one big apology of a Government!