Brexit is a fake revolt – working-class culture is being hijacked to help the elite

Paul Mason in The Guardian

I love fake revolts of the underclass: I’m a veteran of them. At secondary school, we had a revolt in favour of the right to smoke. The football violence I witnessed in the 1970s and 80s felt like the social order turned on its head. As for the mass outpouring of solidarity with the late Princess Diana, and by implication against the entire cruel monarchic elite, in the end I chucked my bunch of flowers on the pile with the rest.

The problem is, I also know what a real revolt looks like. The miners strike; the Arab Spring; the barricade fighting around Gezi Park in Istanbul in 2013. So, to people getting ready for the mother of all revolts on Thursday, I want to point out the crucial difference between a real revolt and a fake one. The elite does not usually lead the real ones. In a real revolt, the rich and powerful usually head for the hills, terrified. Nor are the Sun and the Daily Mail usually to be found egging on a real insurrection.

But, all over Britain, people have fallen for the scam. In the Brexit referendum, we’ve seen what happens when working-class culture gets hijacked – and when the party that is supposed to be defending working people just cannot find the language or the offer to separate a fake revolt from a real one. In many working-class communities, people are getting ready to vote leave not just as a way of telling the neoliberal elite to get stuffed. They also want to discomfort the metropolitan, liberal, university-educated salariat for good measure. For many people involved, it feels like their first ever effective political choice.

I want to have one last go at convincing you that leaving now, under these conditions, would be a disaster. First, let’s recognise the problem. For people in the working classes, wages are at rock bottom. Their employers treat them like dirt. Their high streets are lined with empty shops. Their grown-up kids cannot afford to buy a home. Class sizes at school are too high. NHS waiting times are too long.
I’m glad it has become acceptable to say: “You are right to worry about migration.” But I wish more Labour politicians would spell out why. Working-class people, especially those on low pay in the private sector, worry that in conditions of austerity, housing shortages, wage stagnation and an unlimited supply of migrant labour from Europe has a negative effect on their living standards. For some, that is true.

They are right, too, to worry about the cultural impact. In a big, multi-ethnic city, absorbing a lot of migrants is easy. In small towns, where social capital is already meagre, the migrant population can feel unabsorbed. The structure of temporary migration from Europe means many of those who come don’t vote, or don’t have the right to – which feels unsettling if you understand that it is only by voting that the workforce ever achieved progress. It feels as if, through migration, the establishment got to create the kind of working class it always wanted: fragmented, dislocated, politically distant, weak.

But a Brexit led by Ukip and the Tory right will not make any of these things better: it will make them worse. Take a look at the people leading the Brexit movement. Nigel Farage, Neil Hamilton, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove. They have fought all their lives for one objective: to give more power to employers and less to workers. Many leading Brexiters are on record as wanting to privatise the NHS. They revelled in the destruction of the working-class communities and cultures capable of staging real revolt. Sir James Dyson moved his factory to Malaysia, so much did he love the British workforce. They talk about defying the “elite”. But they are the elite.

Suppose leave wins on Thursday and, within two years, most migration from eastern Europe stops. What is the most likely outcome? For all the rhetoric about “cheap labour”, nobody in the Tory Brexit camp has promised to end it. What they actually promised is to to cut wages and scrap the laws that protect people at work. So even if the migrants stop coming, and maybe a few fruit farms and meat-packing operations in East Anglia shut down, there will still be millions of low-paid jobs on long hours. But guess who will be doing them? Most likely it will be you, the very people flag-waving for the leave camp now: low-skilled people in small towns. And should there be a shortage of unskilled workers, the Brexit camp’s figurehead – Iain Duncan Smith – knows what to do. Before ultimately resigning over benefit cuts, he had made a career out of dragging people out of wheelchairs and off sickbeds and into job assessments designed to cut their benefits.
Some people are fantasising that, if leave wins, Cameron will fall and then there will be a Labour government. But there is no new election on offer. Boris Johnson has already signed a letter pledging to keep Cameron in power if leave wins. Because that’s what elite politicians do: stick together. If leave wins, the most rightwing Tory government since Thatcher will be in charge of negotiating the terms of exit. The same newspapers running fake stories about refugees now will run fake stories about the Labour party to stop it winning the next election.

In the past week, Labour’s frontbench has signalled, loud and clear, that they will take measures to stop the creation of low-paid jobs that only migrants can do; and they will take the issue of free movement into a big renegotiation with the EU as soon as possible. Frankly, they should have done this sooner. I’m glad face-to-face contact with the people they represent has pushed them to accept that free movement should be filtered through strong UK measures to protect the lowest paid and end migrant-only recruitment.

For many people, the Brexit campaign feels, for one brief moment, like the first time they have had control. But the clue is in the word “brief”. Once the vote is over, it will be the rightwing Tories in control. Ask Ukip; ask Boris Johnson: will Brexit guarantee a rise in wages, a cap on rents, a fall in NHS waiting times or class sizes? Ask the leave camp to put targets on these things – not for the longterm, but within 12-18 months. They can’t.

What can is a left-led Labour party, combined with the progressive nationalist parties and the Greens, which will institute real change. There will be no dilemmas in the newsrooms of the Times and Telegraph if that happens: they will unite to crush it.

That’s how you know the difference between a real revolt and a fake one: by its enemies.

The Conservatives are giving us a masterclass in how not to govern

Zoe Williams in The Guardian

There is always a rueful moment following a Conservative election victory, disappointment tinged with the consolation that at least they’ll be solid. Sure, they will want to march back to a time of Victorian certainties, where if you lose it’s because you’re a loser, and if you win, it’s because you goddamn tried. But at least they will captain their vessel with competence and assurance. We might not like where it’s going, but at least we won’t drown.

Consider what good a government of any party can do, if it takes the business of statecraft seriously. It is within its power to solve the housing crisis: not chuck lump sums at the already privileged, but to undertake a building programme of breadth and vision that would change lives. It is easily within a government’s scope to make plans for energy and carbon emissions, half a century into the future. It is within a government’s purview to think radically about what people need, in order to feel optimistic about the future: not just a health service, but a great health service; not just pensions but proper social care; not just benefits but genuine security. All the life-changing architecture of citizenship has been undertaken by good government, thinking decades beyond the electoral cycle, with dreams infinitely greater than personal power.

That’s what is really crushing about our current situation: not that the political landscape was permanently scarred by a brutal act last week; not that we’ve been invited to unleash some pointless vandalism on the EU on the basis of lies from its most ardent proponents; not that all of us have been dragged into a vicious battle between ideas so hollow and limited – free-market fundamentalism versus the same with added racism – that you wouldn’t want to be detained by them for five minutes eavesdropping on the bus, let alone see them obliterate everything else in the public discourse. No, the really dispiriting thing is that we haven’t got a government.

When they’re good, governments embody civility; they can take the instinctive care that we have for one another and turn it into something solid, whether that’s a street light or a tax credit; they can turn hopes into plans; they can make people’s lives better. There were times before this referendum when it may have seemed preferable to have a government doing nothing to one as socially destructive as David Cameron’s. But it would be wrong to lose faith in politics altogether, because of the terrifying spectacle of people doing it wantonly. It is time to remind ourselves what good government can do.

Governments, when they are solid, maintain standards in public life. They do not panic when they’re criticised by the Daily Mail in the middle of a parliamentary term, or when a more radical party such as Ukip seems to be peeling off voters. They do not throw up their hands and offer referendums on amorphous, incomprehensible matters, because they do not sacrifice the stability of the nation for the sake of their own party, and they would not drag a whole continent into their squalid leadership battle.

But if that’s a little specific, let’s frame it more broadly: good governments insist on the decent and truthful use of statistics. They can’t enforce this – they can’t imprison their opponents for making up bogus numbers, and repeating them until half the country believes that they’re true. They can’t do much to insist that the press doesn’t twist or misrepresent the facts, doesn’t stir up hatred with relentless falsification. They can’t even make it a law, I shouldn’t think, that every time a newspaper lies about a foreigner, it has to print the correction with the same prominence as the lie. That would be far too intrusive, a bit too Leveson-y.

Yet a good government will set standards. It will tell the truth itself, and it will be trenchant about accuracy from others. It will not pander, and when it sees racist propaganda material it will say so. No general election has ever been as ugly as this referendum, as personal, as vitriolic, as full of accusations of mendacity, so that the casual voter basically has to guess who is telling the truth by how fast they’re talking and the look in their eyes (although this does give one pretty reliable answer: not Michael Gove). Good governments respect the institutions that provide sound and impartial analysis – universities, the civil service, statistics authorities – and advance their work, rather than routinely falling foul of it themselves.

Good governments, even in the teeth of internecine squabbling, continue to govern: they don’t announce a complete overhaul of prisons, then luxuriate in a six-month hiatus and leave the service wondering whether it was ever meant to be seen through. They don’t part-privatise probation and then lose interest, they don’t try to academise every school and realise the senselessness of that halfway through; they don’t pick a fight with the whole NHS that takes innumerable man-hours to solve and yields nothing but lasting unpleasantness.

Six months ago, this was, it was argued, all the opposition’s fault; a party with a slim majority was behaving like a party with a huge majority, because it knew it would face no resistance. It’s for another conversation whether the opposition has improved, but the question is moot anyway; there is nothing to oppose. The business of governing has ground to a halt, and in its place we find men arguing over whose exaggeration is the most egregious and who looks too scruffy for public life.

This is not the time to lose faith in politics; there has never been a more urgent time to rekindle faith. Remember what politics can do. We cannot conclude, from this sad episode, that its glory days are over.

Three shirts, four pairs of trousers: meet Japan's 'hard-core' minimalists

Reuters in The Guardian

Fumio Sasaki gave away the majority of his possessions and now lives with just the bare essentials.

 

The bathroom cupboard of minimalist Fumio Sasaki. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters




Fumio Sasaki’s one-room Tokyo apartment is so stark friends liken it to an interrogation room. He owns three shirts, four pairs of trousers, four pairs of socks and a meagre scattering of various other items.

Money isn’t the issue. The 36-year-old editor has made a conscious lifestyle choice, joining a growing number of Japanese deciding that less is more.

Influenced by the spare aesthetic of Japan’s traditional Zen Buddhism, minimalists buck the norm in a fervently consumerist society by dramatically paring back their possessions.

Sasaki, once a passionate collector of books, CDs and DVDs, became tired of keeping up with trends two years ago.

“I kept thinking about what I did not own, what was missing,” he says.

He spent the next year selling possessions or giving them to friends.

“Spending less time on cleaning or shopping means I have more time to spend with friends, go out, or travel on my days off. I have become a lot more active,” he says.

Minimalist Naoki Numahata talks to his two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Ei, in their living-room in Tokyo. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Others welcome the chance to own only things they truly like – a philosophy also applied by Mari Kondo, a consultant whose “KonMari” organisational methods have swept the United States.

“It’s not that I had more things than the average person, but that didn’t mean that I valued or liked everything I owned,” says Katsuya Toyoda, an online publication editor who has only one table and one futon in his 22 sqm apartment.

“I became a minimalist so I could let things I truly liked surface in my life.“

Inspiration for Japan’s minimalists came from the US, where early adherents included Steve Jobs.

Definitions vary, because the goal is not just decluttering but re-evaluating what posessions mean, to gain something else – in Sasaki’s case, time to travel.

 Utensils lie in a kitchen drawer in the home of minimalist Saeko Kushibiki in Fujisawa, south of Tokyo. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

Sasaki and others believe there are thousands of hard-core minimalists, with possibly thousands more interested.

Some say minimalism is actually not foreign but a natural outgrowth of Zen Buddhism and its stripped-down world view.

“In the west, making a space complete means placing something there,” says Naoki Numahata, 41, a freelance writer.

“But with tea ceremonies, or Zen, things are left incomplete on purpose to let the person’s imagination make that space complete.”

Minimalists also argue that having fewer possessions is eminently practical in Japan, which is regularly shaken by earthquakes.

 Minimalist Saeko Kushibiki stores away her futon mattress in her apartment in Fujisawa. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters

In 2011, a 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami killed nearly 20,000 people and led to many re-evaluating possessions, Sasaki said.

“Thirty to 50% of earthquake injuries occur through falling objects,” he said, gesturing around his empty apartment.

“But in this room, you don’t have that concern.”

The progressive argument for leaving the EU is not being heard

Larry Elliot in The Guardian


It is now nearly nine years since the problems of three hedge funds heralded the arrival of global financial and economic chaos. Britain’s EU referendum this week is the latest manifestation of that crisis.

That is not the way the debate in the UK has been framed. For one side, the decision is all about taking back control, especially over immigration. For the other, it is about the potential consequences for the economy in general and individuals in particular.

This narrow focus reflects the fact that the referendum has been a contest between two wings of the Conservative party, neither of which has any great love for the EU. Few of the bigger themes have been drawn out by this blue-on-blue affair.

There is, however, an obvious reason why immigration has proved an effective weapon for the leave side. Life is tougher for millions of Britons on modest incomes than it was a decade ago.

Contrast the state of the UK when the accession to the EU of Poland and other former Soviet bloc countries led to strong net migration in 2004. At that time, average earnings were growing by 4-5% a year, the Labour government was investing heavily in schools and hospitals and the eurozone appeared to be over its initial problems.

A second big increase in net migration has occurred since the great recession of 2008 and 2009, but the economic and political environment has changed. Real earnings have been squeezed, the expansion of the public sector has been halted and the eurozone has been in a state of permanent crisis.

The British economy has become increasingly dominated by the fortunes of the financial sector, with the bankers responsible for the worst slump since the 1930s escaping pretty much scot free. London and the rest of the UK have become two countries, which explains why hostility to the EU increases with distance from the capital.

Nor is this phenomenon confined to the UK. It has become commonplace to bracket growing support for leave in poorer parts of Britain with Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican candidate in this year’s US presidential election, but populist and anti EU sentiment is on the rise across Europe.

The US research company Pew conducted a survey earlier this year to test sentiment towards the EU. In Britain, 48% said they had an unfavourable view of the EU and 44% said they had a favourable view. In France, the anti-EU sentiment was much more pronounced at 61% and 38% in favour, while in Germany there had been an eight-point drop in support for the EU in the past year, leaving those in favour only narrowly ahead at 50% against 48% .
The impact of the great recession in Europe has been exacerbated by monetary union, a policy blunder of catastrophic proportions. The euro has been responsible for the slow growth and high unemployment that has angered the French, and the high debts and that have alarmed the Germans. Stir in the unexpectedly large flows of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, and you have a toxic mix.

Last summer, when the Greek debt crisis was at its most intense, Europe’s leaders came up with a plan. The “five presidents’ report” laid down a step-by-step approach to a United States of Europe, with banking union followed by a common budget and finally political union. Getting even the least controversial part of this agenda – banking union – past sceptical European electorates has proved impossible. Yet the alternative approach, breaking up the euro and giving countries more control over their own economic destiny, is seen as not just potentially dangerous but also a betrayal of the idea of ever-closer union.

When Britain first sought to join the Common Market in the 1960s it did so for pragmatic, not ideological reasons. There was no great desire to pool sovereignty in pursuit of wider political goals, merely a feeling that Germany, France and the Netherlands were growing faster and had more modern economies. After Britain finally became a member of the European club in 1973, there was admiration for Germany’s control of inflation. In the 1980s, the UK left wing changed sides because it saw Europe as a bulwark against Margaret Thatcher. European solidarity was advocated in the 1990s as the best defence against the forces of global capitalism unleashed by the end of the cold war, which is why many on the left wanted Britain to join the single currency.

Times have changed. Even with a welcome pickup in activity in the past year, Europe’s growth performance since the launch of the euro has been pitiful. Talk of protecting workers’ rights is meaningless unless you have a job, and millions of Europe’s citizens do not. The structural adjustment programmes forced on those countries that have required financial bailouts have involved savage attacks on workers’ rights, including collective bargaining. The EU has not taken the fight to multinational capital. Rather, Brussels has become a honeypot for corporate lobbyists demanding deregulation and the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP).

One of the great ironies of the UK’s referendum debate is that Europe, with its austerity programmes and its drift towards neoliberalism, has been moving in a direction that rightwing Conservatives would tend to support. Just as in the UK in the 1980s, unemployment has weakened the power of organised labour and the trend is for more competition and for free markets.

There is a modern and progressive argument for leaving the EU, but it has struggled to be heard during this dispiriting campaign. It is that Europe is unable to deliver because it is wedded to backward-looking ideas. Or to adapt the words that David Cameron used on his first outing as Conservative leader to taunt Tony Blair, it was the future once.

There is a leftwing case for staying in too. This accepts that the EU is far from perfect and must change, but says the answer is to work for a kinder, gentler, greener and more equal Europe from within. Exit, by contrast, would be the catalyst for a breakup of the EU that would give rise to aggressive nationalism and leave Britain at the mercy of rightwing Conservatives who would have the wherewithal to cause immense damage before there was a chance to get rid of them at an election.

Yet, it is stretching a point to argue that the treatment of Greece has much to do with the theories of Maynard Keynes or that TTIP would sit comfortably with Fritz Schumacher’s “small is beautiful” vision. Europe has been going in an entirely different direction, which is why aggressive nationalism will continue to be a problem even if Britain votes to remain. That’s because Europe’s economic model isn’t working and hasn’t been working for a long time. Bad economics leads to bad politics. Always has, always will.