Brexit parties

My theory (which is mine, and mine alone, about the dinosaurs <frying pan clang>), is that Brexit is such an intense divide in English (not UK) politics, which cleaves on reactionary nationalist lines between fundamentally different concepts of Englishness, that Ingerlan may well end up, after Scotland goes walkies, with two parties defined by their positions on Brexit. There is a precedent in Ireland, where the two main parties, Fine Fáil and Fianna Gael, are defined by positions on the treaty which formed the Northern Ireland province in the 20s, and not by class as in the UK.

I can easily see the current parties dissolving into rumps, and the main forces being pro-EU and pro-USA parties. The Tories have been riven into Europhile and Atlanticist factions going back to the 80s (remember Westland?), and that was the genesis of the referendum. Any materialist fule kno that politics follows the economic base, and Capital is deeply split on EU-US allegiances. (The emergence of the TIG, IMO, is a manifestation of Manufacturing Capital shit-scared of being wrenched from its main profit source, Europe.)

There is clearly an openly Atlanticist wing of the Tories. Only this week, Private Eye reported that Oiky Gove, PM in waiting according to the bookies, attended a 3-day all-expenses-paid conference in the States with billionaires, neocons, and leaders of multinational corporations. Liam Fox’s US connections go back nearly two decades, and he’s clearly working on the US’s behalf to turn the UK into a free-fire low-tax low-regulation enterprise zone. The Mog Rees’s connections are more opaque, but he’s clearly well in with Trump and his mates and stands to make big bucks (sic) on a hard Brexit. More could be mentioned, such as Owen ‘Chinless’ Paterson. Whether or not Brexit is hard or lubricated, you can see that lot forming a new Atlanticist party in a few years, especially if Ireland re-unites under Brexit pressures.

As the old saying goes: it all comes down to economics, it always does.

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Big Sister makes her move

The calling of an early election by our Big Sister, Theresa May, is not surprising. Indeed, the only surprise is that some folk were taken by surprise by it. This was nailed on. Indeed, the bookies had it as 6/4 second favourite after a 2020 election. Big Sister has a golden opportunity to boost her majoriity, wiping the floor with a disabled, divided and failing Labour party. She’d have been a fool not to do it. Sadly, this will lead to the Tories in power for at least a generation. Scotland will go walkies taking the only effective opposition away with it. Even NI might secede. Even if Labour miraculously stopped infighting, constituency changes will rob it of tens of seats in England.

Labour will never, ever again rule on its own. The *only* chance to defeat the Tories and save the country for the younger generation, who are not to blame for the Brexit and rampant kipperism voted for by reactionary wrinklies and the zombie fraction of the old, decaying working class, is to form a progressive alliance. However, such is the tribalism and denialism in the Labour Party, there are two chances of that happening: fat and slim (and Slim just left town).

The Fixed-term Parliament Act, which was supposed to remove the ability to call snap elections, is clearly the joke it was intended to be when it was passed. It requires that 2/3 of the Commons vote for a snap election, but the Labour Party has absolutely no choice but to vote for it and welcome an early election, even though it’s putting the last nails into its own coffin.

A very English fascism beckons. There is no hope at all for Ingerlan for the foreseeable future, during which time it will become the 51st state of Trump’s USA and a playground for rapacious multinationals. Intelligent young people who can will leave Ingerlan in droves for civilised countries, which will accelerate Ingerlan’s rapid decline. Sadly, this leads to another Cassandra-ite prediction: Ingerlan will close its borders not to prevent immigration (though that’ll be the official reason) but to prevent the flight of the educated young.

Health and Education of proles

In the hurly-burly of 24/7 news, it’s often difficult to see the underlying trends and causes of events as you’re too busy firefighting the stories that come at you. Privatisation, NHS crisis, grammar schools, austerity – all seem separate, and all have their own ostensible rationales. Privatisation is to improve competition and efficiency. The NHS is bloated and inefficient. Grammar schools raise academic standards. Austerity is to reduce the ‘national debt’.

All those rationales are, of course, bollocks squared, and essentially propaganda for deeper motives. Many other writers have delved into these so I’ll not duplicate effort. What does seem to baffle many, particularly liberal, commentators, is why education and health are bearing the brunt of new measures, not least their removal from local control and accountability (academies, NHS trusts), together with spending cuts and privatisations. Pundits can’t see why successive regimes, NuLabor and now Tories, are running down the cornerstones of civilised society, as education and health are so obviously critical for the success (however measured) and longevity of civilised nations – even if it’s not the bleeding obvious, the evidence from Scandinavian countries shows this very clearly. An educated and healthy population is, on the whole, a contented and productive population. So why are the Tories (pink now blue) bent on ignoring this evidence? You could just say that Tories are evil, but that’s both untrue and obscures their essential nature, and just looks at the surface of events.

Death to manufacturing

With automation and the near-destruction of manufacturing industry, most of the working class is surplus to requirements from a labour viewpoint. In the decades following WWII, manufacturing industry needed educated and healthy workers to populate its factories and make profits. This need no longer exists. The Thatcherite regime deliberately ran down manufacturing Capital at the expense of Finance Capital, and fuelled the latter with back-of-the-lorry privatisations which poured money into the City.  Domestic manufacturers, and the industries that supplied them (not least coal mining), went to the wall, with millions of skilled and semi-skilled jobs. Trades unions, which opposed this destruction, were in their own turn systematically destroyed, through State force. As a result, the jobs that are left are in fragmented industries, and usually semi- or even unskilled precarious McJobs – zero hours contracts are just the most logical consequences of these trends towards the atomisation and deskilling of work. These trends are not the result of some natural law, some force of evolution you can do nowt about, but are rather the deliberate constructs of the UK State and multinational corporations, particularly in the Finance sector. They are a consequence of the chronic economic decline of the UK against other nations, but that decline is itself a deliberate construct to enrich MNCs and Finance corporations. If you asset-strip a privatised industry, it’s unsurprising that the industry is badly weakened and will only grow weakly, if at all. Long-term capital planning is not a feature of Finance Capital.

Proles don’t need no education

Multinational corporations no longer need grunt labour, and neither does Finance Capital. All they need is a small technocratic managerial class to run their systems, a class which is increasingly produced by selective schools, both private and public, and the most expensive (for students) university system in Europe. For all the talk about ‘inclusivity’, students in higher education are increasingly from wealthy backgrounds. Proles have to make do with vocational Further Education, if they can afford it, or just not go into post-school education at all. Universities produce the technocratic managers to fulfil corporate requirements, and the connections of student’s families in the upper middle classes ensure that Rupert and Annabelle get placed with the ‘right’ employers where their careers can blossom. Darren and Sharon, even if they rack up the £40k or so of debt a 3-year degree course brings, are unlikely to have the connections to get on, and may well end up in McJobs with the rest of the grunts, which they know very well and is an increasing disincentive for working class youth to get into HE.

As corporations no longer need educated proles, they don’t see why they should cough up taxes to pay for public education unless they own that education. Hence the proliferation of academies, which are essentially privatised schools taken over by corporations to serve their own labour needs. Non-academy schools are just a drain on the corporate taxpayer.

Proles don’t need no healthcare

What applies to education applies to Spades in healthcare, which is an order of magnitude more expensive than public education. It’s the largest single item of State spending. Back in the days when tens of millions of workers needed to be kept healthy to run factories, the tax taken for the NHS was seen as worthwhile by Manufacturing Capital, for all the regular gripes of captains of industry, as it fed into their bottom lines. Now, the NHS is caring for people who, simply, are not needed by corporations, and they resent (and increasingly avoid, on a staggering scale) taxes to pay for healthcare. It’s not going to feed into Apple’s bottom line that Jane Bloggs from the council estate needs expensive treatment to stay healthy, or even alive, as she’ll never contribute to Apple’s profits other than, perhaps, as a consumer.

The political wing of Capital

The Tories (pink and blue) represent the capitalist class, the main differences and tensions being between different factions of this class (finance, manufacturing, landowning, services). Nowadays the clearly dominant factions are MNCs and City corporations. Hence tax cuts for corporations (if Osborne’s last budget is implemented, down to 15%), welfare cuts for proles and increasingly draconian conditions for claiming what’s left, privatisations, and public spending cuts.

The cuts in health, the privatisation (academies) and re-elitisation (grammar schools) of education, are the surface symptoms of deeper economic trends. For all Big Sister’s crowd-pleasing ‘one nation’ rhetoric, the reality is that, to the Tories and their masters, us proles no longer need educating or keeping healthy. As long as we’re semi-literate and semi-numerate we can carry out the zero-hours temporary McJobs which are the only ones left to us. If we get ill or fall off the perch, there are plenty more who can take our place.

The future

There is a strong and growing argument for a Universal Basic Income, to cater for the simple fact that millions of us will be unemployed, underemployed and poor in a fairly near (maybe a decade or two) future of automation. It’s a compelling argument, if couched in moral, political, practical and economic terms, and even elements of the Right support it. On current trends, though, it will never happen, because corporations will not countenance paying the taxes for it. They’ll cough up for State security to keep revolting proles under control, but that’s it. Sadly, the most likely future will be that of so many dystopian Science Fiction novels, where an ultra-rich corporate class rules a mass of impoverished and repressed proles with a fist of iron and totalitarian technologies, and the State is reduced to a minimalist function of protecting Capital.

Racism referendum

There are many rational, cogent and even attractive reasons to leave the EU, including some advanced by the Left. Indeed, until relatively recently, it was the Left that was anti-EU on the grounds that it’s an undemocratic bosses club, a position held by Tony Benn and many trade union leaders and Labour activists. Pre-Blair, it was the default Labour Party position. These arguments advanced against the EU are still sound, and can be seen on the Left Leave ‘Lexit’ website. The treatment of Greece by the Troika and the Eurocrats, Merkel at the forefront, was of itself a good reason to stick two fingers up to the European Commission – destroying a nation’s economy, enforcing regime change, and turning it into a creditor vassal State for corporations and banks to pick apart, privatising everything in sight, exposed the iron corporate fist behind the EU’s velvet glove of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy’. Indeed, Owen Jones, the UK Left’s rising star, was one of many at the time who were in favour of a Brexit after the EU’s coup d’etat, though he’s since switched back to Remain.

Even on the Right, there are rational social, political and economic arguments for Brexit, and on occasion Right voices have been known to expound these in the print and broadcast media, mostly to a chattering classes audience it has to be said.

However, as sadly predicted by this blog back in February (Brexit: Project Fear) there is one, and only one, topic in the ‘debate’ on EU membership: immigration. The Leave campaign bangs the xenophobic drum loudly daily, with its other arguments being mere tinkling triangles in the background. The Remain campaign is continually on the back foot, as it feels that it can’t be seen to be for immigration, which in today’s Ingerlan is political death, so it can’t refute the xenophobia and blatant racism of Leave because they’re both playing on the same pitch, with Leave 5-0 up approaching full time.

Bogeymen ‘R’ Us

Only recently we’ve had Leave raising the bogeyman of 70 million Turks at the gates with possible EU accession of Turkey [1], and the tried and trusted racist tropes have been wheeled out: Turks have a high birth rate (the immigrants will outbreed us), a criminal gun-ridden society (immigrant criminals will take over from our indigenous white English criminals), an alien religion (for all that Turkey’s still an avowedly secular State), rampant poverty (immigrant scroungers will pile over here for our benefits and living wage), terrorism (even though terrorism in Turkey is strictly about local causes), and poor healthcare (immigrant sickies will overload our NHS, even though our NHS is entirely dependent on immigrant labour). A Leave mouthpiece, Penny Mordaunt, said:

“Since the birthrate in Turkey is so high, we can expect to see an additional million people added to the UK population from Turkey alone within eight years. This will not only increase the strain on Britain’s public services, but it will also create a number of threats to UK security. Crime is far higher in Turkey than the UK. Gun ownership is also more widespread. Because of the EU’s free movement laws, the government will not be able to exclude Turkish criminals from entering the UK.” [2]

The only tropes she failed to invoke were foreigners spreading diseases and molesting our innocent English roses, although Fruitcake Farage remedied the latter by claiming that immigration would lead to rapes and sexual assaults [3].

One issue to bind them

Thus the only issue in the referendum ‘debate’ is immigration. Leave knows that it plays well with the white English, particularly in the unconscious working class and the barking petit-bourgeoisie. Fear and hatred of foreigners is ingrained in reactionary Englishness, and in backwards English nationalism. To use a common cliché: xenophobia is in the English DNA. You just need to skimread Robert Winder’s well-researched book “Bloody foreigners: the story of immigration to Britain” (ISBN 978-0-349-13880-0) to see that xenophobia has an inglorious history in Ingerlan going back to medieval times. For those of us of Irish heritage (that’s ‘Micks’, ‘Paddies’, ‘Fenian bastards’ and ‘Boghoppers’ to youse xenophobes) over 40, there’s the direct experience of the 70s and 80s when we were then as the Muslims are now: alien religionists, terrorist sympathisers, breeding like rabbits, not integrating, criminals, etc. Racist abuse and Irish jokes were commonplace even in my school. Then after us there were Ugandan Asians who really copped it (at least the Irish are, on the whole, palefaced), but you can go back to the Huguenots and earlier to find fear and hatred of foreign demons. English racism never changes its form, only its targets.

Vote Brexit, vote xenophobia

Thus, for all the rational arguments that could be advanced for/against EU membership, only one irrational argument is being used: xenophobia. Fear and hatred of the unknown demonic Other. When the Great English Public [TM] cast their votes on the 23rd June, this will be the primary issue in their minds. The only question is: will the clear rational economic self-interest of the public in staying in Europe be overruled by the irrational fear of foreigners?  June 23rd will be a massive opinion poll to answer the question: do the English hate and fear foreigners? If a Brexit result, the clear answer will be Yes; if Remain, a tentative No.

References

[1] EU referendum: Vote Leave faces criticism over Turkey ‘criminals’ claim. Independent, 21/5/16

[2] Vote Leave embroiled in race row over Turkey security threat claims. Guardian online, 22/5/16

[3] Nigel Farage: Migrants could pose sex attack threat to Britain. Telegraph, 4/6/16

Brexit: Project Fear

Cartoon from Private Eye on Brexit which sums up the central ‘issue’ of the referendum.

The second lead story in today’s Grauniad, on the split amongst anti-EU groups, has the following:

“[Douglas] Carswell said Vote Leave wanted to run a campaign that was “optimistic, upbeat, internationalist, a campaign that focuses on the economy”. But Leave.EU want to focus “primarily on the issues of identity and on immigration,” he said.”

Leave.eu has the blessing of Farage, and is front-runner to be the official anti-EU group and get electoral dosh. Fruitcake Fascist Lite Farage is quoted as follows:

“[Vote Leave] do not believe that open borders, immigration and our security are key to this referendum. All polling shows that they are wrong,” he wrote. […]

“Of course we must debate economics and the business case in order to combat the fears put out by politicians and their big business supporters. But amongst the undecided voters the top issue by far and the one that will influence where their vote goes is our lack of border controls as EU members.

The sad but predictable thing is that the forthcoming EU referendum won’t be won or lost on issues of economy, social justice, future prospects, etc, but by fear and loathing of immigrants and refugees. English people will vote with their gut, and the guts of a major chunk of English folk are conditioned by the barking Press and xenophobic politicos on the make (much like Milosevic and Tudjman back in the 90s, though not as yet on such a tragic scale). This backwards part of the population has the brains of a hamster and lives in perpetual fear of the Demonic Other massing across the sea waiting to swarm into this dark and unpleasant land and take what few jobs and little wealth remains for the pasty-faced indigenes. Even child refugees are viewed with dark hostility by this zombie fraction of the English.

For sure, there’s also a large section of English society that actively works for and with refugees (I personally know one such), has the innate human values of compassion and solidarity for fellow humans in distress, and is forward-looking and inclusive. Maybe this is a majority, though it’s hard to tell. However, this fraction gets almost zero air time and only gets a mention in the Grauniad – the agenda is set by the barking neo-fascist Press (step forward, Mail and Super Soaraway Scum) run by rich foreigners (natch) , Ukippers, the Colonel Tufton-Buftons and their rose-tinted nostalgia for Empire, the US agents in Tory ranks (Fox, Lawson, Jones come to mind), and the neo-fascists of the EDL and Britain First. Irrationality rules – reason is permanently out to lunch.

On the plus side, a Brexit will definitely mean Scotland going walkies to stay in the EU. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good…

Oldham and consciousness

The Oldham byelection, caused by the sad death of the socialist MP Michael Meacher, will be a good indicator of the state of political consciousness amongst the English working class. A solidly Labour seat in what used to be known as ‘industrial heartlands’, it now has a roughly 25% Asian population, mostly Muslim, and there have been ‘racial tensions’ in the declining town going back to the 2001 riots. The neo-fascist UKIP is pulling out the stops to get a result. If UKIP does win, or seriously reduce the Labour majority, that’ll show that the English working class is still in a state of unconscious political zombiedom; if Labour retains or increases its majority after the election of Jeremy “The Beard” Corbyn and his socialist agenda, that will indicate that perhaps the white working class is regaining some consciousness and that there’s some hope for the future.

The rush to war

A thoughtful, sober and detailed article from Patrick Cockburn, one of the few UK journalists who knows what the feck he’s talking about when it comes to the Middle East, appeared in The Independent yesterday [1], and is worth a detailed read if you want to have a rational understanding of the issues behind the UK joining in the rush to bomb Isis in Syria.

A very simple point is clear: Isis retaliates against countries that bomb it, so a UK bombing campaign will have limited, if any, military effectiveness, but will guarantee an Isis attack in the UK. This point is hardly lost on the Security State, for all that rentaquote politicians declare any such talk to be ‘justifying’ terrorist attacks. It’s the bleedin’ obvious: you hit them, they’ll hit you back. Blair and Bush’s war in Iraq resulted directly in attacks on the UK and US mainlands, and didn’t result in attacks in countries that weren’t involved in the adventure.That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t hit, as Cockburn points out, but if you are going to hit you’d best be prepared for inevitable retaliation, and you need to balance the value of your hit against the blowback.

In order to guard against such retaliation, many UK cities will see increased armed police, and perhaps even military, presences, and online surveillance will step up yet another notch towards totalitarianism. Not to mention the commitment to the ‘War on terror’ [TM] which already costs many billions annually, funds which thus can’t be used for, say, healthcare or housing or infrastructure. Already, the State has suddenly found £2bn after the Paris attacks, to pay for 1500 more spooks and ramp up the power of the Security Statel (money that’s not, for instance, available to junior doctors).

Funny, though: according to the knee-jerking sound-biting politicians, our best response to terrorism is to keep calm and carry on with our ordinary lives, yet the same politicians are ensuring, by ramping up the “security level” another notch towards martial law, that we live in a perpetual state of fear and suspicion of others (particularly dark-skinned others).

I’m reminded of the famous old saying: War is the health of the State. Only in war does the State find its true function and justification. The Isis atrocities come as manna from heaven for the Security State.

It’s at times like these, when the red mist of bellicosity engulfs the media and the political classes, that sober and rational voices are needed. Hence Jezza “The Beard” Corbyn’s bravery in sticking to his pacific guns (to use an oxymoronic metaphor):

“For the past 14 years, Britain has been at the centre of a succession of disastrous wars that have brought devastation to large parts of the wider Middle East. They have increased, not diminished, the threats to our own national security in the process.” [2]

It takes real personal bravery to stand up for anti-war principles when all around you are spoiling for death and destruction, even ‘colleagues’ in your own Party. Kudos to the guy. To use an incendiary metaphor, you do not put out fires with gasoline, as the past decade has so clearly shown, and Jezza deserves credit for repeatedly and stubbornly saying the bleedin’ obvious.

References

[1] Britain must learn from past mistakes before joining the civil war in Syria. Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 21/11/15

[2] Jeremy Corbyn: Interventions in Middle East ‘have increased terror threat in Britain’. The Independent, 20/11/15

A very Labour coup

There’s a very traditional Right-wing Labour coup in the offing, with increased mutterings from the pink Tory wing about the leadership election process being ‘undemocratic’ and calling for it to be ‘suspended’. Unlike Jeremy “The Beard” Corbyn, who’s pretty moderate in traditional Labour terms, this nascent coup takes me back to the 80s when members and activists tried to make the Party democratic and wrest it away from the dead hands of union leaders and the Parliamentary Labour Party, who’d lost bigtime to Thatcher’s Tories. All sorts of manoeuvres, some successful, others not, were carried out by the Party establishment to strangle this democratisation in its infancy. When the Right lost, it got the almighty hump and split into the SDP under the Gang of Four.

In the longer term, after the Gang of Four took their ball away, the Right won – Party democracy was destroyed, Blair took over and carried out a counter-revolution (Thatcher famously said that New Labour was one of her proudest achievements), conference was reduced to a Spectacle, and local parties lost all power, even to select their own candidates.

The Labour Right has always been in favour of ‘democracy’ when it works in their favour, but when the members look to be making the ‘wrong’ decisions then the Right does its damnedest to stitch up the ‘right’ result. An irony with the latest Right mutterings about the leadership election is that the one-member-one-vote system was invented by the Right so as to remove power from trades unions and local parties, and put it in the hands of individual members whom the Right thought could be trusted to vote the ‘sensible’ way. Now that these individuals look to be revolting and acting ‘childishly’ and ’emotionally’, the Right is trying to deligitimise the whole contest and, if possible, cancel it. Plus ça change, plus c’est le feckin‘ même chose.

If UKIP gain power…

If there’s a Tory-UKIP coalition after the Spectacle – sorry, ‘general election’ – then the following will surely happen:

1. The UK withdraws from the EU.

2. As UK withdrawal is a major constitutional change, Scotland holds another independence referendum, and this time the Yes camp wins hands down and Scotland secedes from the UK.

3. Sterling goes into freefall as Capital flees back to the EU.

4. The UK signs up to a Transatlantic Trade Agreement with the US, with all the political and military obligations that entails.

5. Northern regions of England agitate for vastly increased autonomy from the SE and sign bilateral trade deals with Scotland.

6. Tens of thousands of people cross the Border, both English progressives looking for a social democratic haven, and immigrants from the EU wanting to move back to an EU nation.

That’s for starters. Those are all ‘forced moves’, as they say in Chess.

Poshboy goes English nationalist

It’s bad enough that this election/Spectacle has been irrevocably poisoned by xenophobia and racism (sorry, ‘immigration policy’), but now Poshboy, no doubt under the Svengali-esque influence of that Strine wideboy, Linton Crosby, is going all English nationalist to try to steal UKIP’s clothes. Stirring up reactionary nationalism in an era of extreme (for sure, more extreme than I’ve come across in my lifetime [1]) xenophobia is a very, very dangerous move. Reactionary English nationalism is already at fever pitch, and generating anti-Jock sentiment adds Scottophobia to xenophobia and throws petrol on the fire. Thus far, Scottish ‘nationalism’ is a long way to the Left of NuLabor, and is a polar opposite to the English nationalism of White Van Man and UKIP, but there are reactionary elements to all nationalisms and the worse English nationalism gets, the more the darker reactionary elements of Scottish nationalism will be fed and watered.

The war in the Balkans in the 90s should be a strong warning of what happens when demagogic politicians play the nationalist card. We’re nowhere near that stage yet, thank the stars, but I can honestly see a closed Border and armed conflict in a worst-case scenario, with a barking Tory-UKIP regime South of the Border and an increasingly Left-wing SNP regime to the North.

See the previous post to this for a dose of Cassandrism (is that a word?) which I really hope is my imagination working overtime…

References/articles

[1] Reading the comments on the Channel 4 News Facebook page is a dark and unpleasant education into the true views of barking English nationalists and UKIPpers. Just see any story that’s even vaguely immigration-related and view the comments. Particularly disgraceful, and disturbing, are comments on the recent tragedies of hundreds of refugees dying at sea, with one poster describing them as “human rats”. So much for the ‘British values’ of tolerance and fair play…

Playing the anti-Scotland card is Cameron’s last resort. Seumas Milne, Guardian online, 22/4/15. A powerful article from one of the Guardian’s token socialists. If Milibean would be in the pocket of Sturgeon (debatable, to be sure), then Poshboy would be beholden to Farage’s Fruitcakes and the barking Ulster Unionist parties.

“Cheerled by a Conservative press largely owned by tax-dodging overseas plutocrats, the Tories claim the English would be held to ransom under a Miliband government dependent on SNP support. The Scots, who were begged to stay in the union during last year’s referendum, are now portrayed as some kind of foreign menace.”

PM sets out ‘English votes’ timetable. BBC News, 24/4/15