Paul Mason in The Guardian
In the progressive half of British politics we need a plan to put our stamp on the Brexit result – and fast.
We must prevent the Conservative right using the Brexit negotiations to reshape Britain into a rule-free space for corporations; we need to take control of the process whereby the rights of the citizen are redefined against those of a newly sovereign state.
Above all we need to provide certainty and solidarity to the millions of EU migrants who feel like the Brits threw them under a bus this week.
In short, we can and must fight to place social justice and democracy at the heart of the Brexit negotiations. I call this ProgrExit – progressive exit. It can be done, but only if all the progressive parties of Britain set aside some of what divides them and unite around a common objective.
The position of Labour is pivotal. Only Labour can provide the framework of a government that could stop Boris Johnson, abetted by Nigel Farage, turning Britain into a Thatcherite free-market wasteland.
Labour – and I mean here the 400,000 people with party cards and a meeting to go to – must go beyond the analysis and grieving stage, and do something new.
First, Labour must clearly accept Brexit. There can be no second referendum, no legal sabotage effort. Labour has to become a party designed to deliver social justice outside the EU. It should, for the foreseeable future, abandon the objective of a return to EU membership. We are out, and must make the best of it.
Next, we should fight for an early election. Almost all parts of the Labour movement have reason to resist this: for the Blairites it holds the danger that Corbyn will become PM – something they thought they had years to sabotage. For Corbyn, the nightmare is he gets stuck as a Labour prime minister with a Parliamentary Labour Party that does not support him. For the unions, they are out of cash. For the new breed of post-2015 activists, bruised by being told to eff off by what they assumed were their core supporters, it feels like a bad time to go back on the doorstep. But we must go there.
An early election – I favour late November – is the only democratic outcome in the present situation. No politician has a mandate to design a specific Brexit negotiation stance now. The only one with a democratic mandate to rule Britain just resigned, and his party’s 2015 manifesto is junk.
Europe cannot conduct meaningful Brexit negotiations with a scratch-together rump Tory government. So the whole process will be on hold.
In the election Labour should offer an informal electoral pact to the Scottish National Party, Greens and Plaid Cymru. The aims should be a) defeating Ukip and b) preventing the formation of a Tory-Ukip-DUP government that would enact the ultra-right Brexit scenario.
Caroline Lucas has indicated the price of such a pact might be a commitment to proportional representation. Labour – which cannot govern what is left of the UK alone, once Scotland leaves – should accede to this.
If, as a result of the snap election, Labour can form a coalition government with the SNP, Plaid and Greens, it should do so.
However, the most obvious problem is the position of Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon is right to demand a new independence vote, and to explore how to time that vote in a way that maintains Scotland’s continuous membership of the EU.
Given the strength of the remain vote in Scotland, Scottish Labour is faced with a big decision: does it oppose independence and go with Brexit to maintain the Union, or switch now to promoting independence to stay in the EU? I favour the latter, but it should be for Scottish Labour members to make that decision independently.
At Westminster, however, Labour should offer – in return for a coalition government – a no-penalty Scottish secession plan from the UK, funded and overseen by the Treasury and Bank of England.
Proportional representation, coalition government and Scottish independence were not in Labour’s game plan at 10pm on Thursday night. But neither was Brexit.
If the political ideas in your head, cultivated over a lifetime, rebel against all this, you must get used to it: with or without the help of the PLP, Scotland is headed out of the UK. But Labour has the opportunity to make that separation amicable; it will be obligatory for all progressive parties to ally with the Scots as – inevitably – the authoritarians of Ukip try to prevent Sturgeon’s second referendum.
As to what a Labour/SNP/Plaid and Green coalition would argue in the Brexit negotiations, the baseline has to be maintaining the existing progressive legislation on employment, consumer rights, women’s rights, the environment etc. But at the same time a Labour-led Brexit negotiation would have to drive a hard bargain over ending bans on state aid, or on nationalisation.
If it were possible to conclude a deal within the European Economic Area I would favour that. But the baseline has to be a new policy on migration designed for the moment free movement ceases to apply. It should be humane, generous, and led by the needs of employers, local communities and universities – and being an EU member should get you a lot of points.
But – and this is the final mindset shift we in Labour must make – free movement is over. Free movement was a core principle of the EU, developed over time. We are no longer part of that, and to reconnect with our voting base – I don’t mean the racists but the thousands of ordinary Labour voters, including black and Asian people – we have to design a migration policy that works for them, and not for rip-off construction bosses or slavedrivers on the farms of East Anglia.
Britain is not, as the far left peevishly dubbed it, “rainy, fascist island”: we’ve snatched glory from the jaws of ignominy in our history before now – but only when politicians have shown vision.
If they don’t show vision, we – the rank and file of Labour, the left nationalists and the Greens – who have way more in common than political labels suggest, should force them to unite and fight.
Sunday, 26 June 2016
Britain’s Democratic Failure
Ken Rogoff
The real lunacy of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union was not that British leaders dared to ask their populace to weigh the benefits of membership against the immigration pressures it presents. Rather, it was the absurdly low bar for exit, requiring only a simple majority. Given voter turnout of 70%, this meant that the leave campaign won with only 36% of eligible voters backing it. (Editor's note - Governments change on similar votes in first past the post systems)
This isn’t democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence – far greater even than amending a country’s constitution (of course, the United Kingdom lacks a written one) – has been made without any appropriate checks and balances.
Does the vote have to be repeated after a year to be sure? No. Does a majority in Parliament have to support Brexit? Apparently not. Did the UK’s population really know what they were voting on? Absolutely not. (Editor's note - Should they be denied the vote?) Indeed, no one has any idea of the consequences, both for the UK in the global trading system, or the effect on domestic political stability. I am afraid it is not going to be a pretty picture.
Mind you, citizens of the West are blessed to live in a time of peace: changing circumstances and priorities can be addressed through democratic processes instead of foreign and civil wars. But what, exactly, is a fair, democratic process for making irreversible, nation-defining decisions? Is it really enough to get 52% to vote for breakup on a rainy day?
In terms of durability and conviction of preferences, most societies place greater hurdles in the way of a couple seeking a divorce than Prime Minister David Cameron’s government did on the decision to leave the EU. Brexiteers did not invent this game; there is ample precedent, including Scotland in 2014 and Quebec in 1995. But, until now, the gun’s cylinder never stopped on the bullet. Now that it has, it is time to rethink the rules of the game.
The idea that somehow any decision reached anytime by majority rule is necessarily “democratic” is a perversion of the term. (Editor's note - What is democratic - listening to the minority view? - upper class angst?) Modern democracies have evolved systems of checks and balances to protect the interests of minorities and to avoid making uninformed decisions with catastrophic consequences. The greater and more lasting the decision, the higher the hurdles.
That’s why enacting, say, a constitutional amendment generally requires clearing far higher hurdles than passing a spending bill. Yet the current international standard for breaking up a country is arguably less demanding than a vote for lowering the drinking age.
With Europe now facing the risk of a slew of further breakup votes, an urgent question is whether there is a better way to make these decisions. I polled several leading political scientists to see whether there is any academic consensus; unfortunately, the short answer is no.
For one thing, the Brexit decision may have looked simple on the ballot, but in truth no one knows what comes next after a leave vote. What we do know is that, in practice, most countries require a “supermajority” for nation-defining decisions, not a mere 51%. There is no universal figure like 60%, but the general principle is that, at a bare minimum, the majority ought to be demonstrably stable. A country should not be making fundamental, irreversible changes based on a razor-thin minority that might prevail only during a brief window of emotion. Even if the UK economy does not fall into outright recession after this vote (the pound’s decline might cushion the initial blow), there is every chance that the resulting economic and political disorder will give some who voted to leave “buyers’ remorse.”
Since ancient times, philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that informed parties get a larger say in critical decisions, not to mention that minority voices are heard. In the Spartan assemblies of ancient Greece, votes were cast by acclamation. People could modulate their voice to reflect the intensity of their preferences, with a presiding officer carefully listening and then declaring the outcome. It was imperfect, but maybe better than what just happened in the UK.
By some accounts, Sparta’s sister state, Athens, had implemented the purest historical example of democracy. All classes were given equal votes (albeit only males). Ultimately, though, after some catastrophic war decisions, Athenians saw a need to give more power to independent bodies.
What should the UK have done if the question of EU membership had to be asked (which by the way, it didn’t)? Surely, the hurdle should have been a lot higher; for example, Brexit should have required, say, two popular votes spaced out over at least two years, followed by a 60% vote in the House of Commons. If Brexit still prevailed, at least we could know it was not just a one-time snapshot of a fragment of the population.
The UK vote has thrown Europe into turmoil. A lot will depend on how the world reacts and how the UK government manages to reconstitute itself. It is important to take stock not just of the outcome, though, but of the process. Any action to redefine a long-standing arrangement on a country’s borders ought to require a lot more than a simple majority in a one-time vote. The current international norm of simple majority rule is, as we have just seen, a formula for chaos.
The real lunacy of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union was not that British leaders dared to ask their populace to weigh the benefits of membership against the immigration pressures it presents. Rather, it was the absurdly low bar for exit, requiring only a simple majority. Given voter turnout of 70%, this meant that the leave campaign won with only 36% of eligible voters backing it. (Editor's note - Governments change on similar votes in first past the post systems)
This isn’t democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence – far greater even than amending a country’s constitution (of course, the United Kingdom lacks a written one) – has been made without any appropriate checks and balances.
Does the vote have to be repeated after a year to be sure? No. Does a majority in Parliament have to support Brexit? Apparently not. Did the UK’s population really know what they were voting on? Absolutely not. (Editor's note - Should they be denied the vote?) Indeed, no one has any idea of the consequences, both for the UK in the global trading system, or the effect on domestic political stability. I am afraid it is not going to be a pretty picture.
Mind you, citizens of the West are blessed to live in a time of peace: changing circumstances and priorities can be addressed through democratic processes instead of foreign and civil wars. But what, exactly, is a fair, democratic process for making irreversible, nation-defining decisions? Is it really enough to get 52% to vote for breakup on a rainy day?
In terms of durability and conviction of preferences, most societies place greater hurdles in the way of a couple seeking a divorce than Prime Minister David Cameron’s government did on the decision to leave the EU. Brexiteers did not invent this game; there is ample precedent, including Scotland in 2014 and Quebec in 1995. But, until now, the gun’s cylinder never stopped on the bullet. Now that it has, it is time to rethink the rules of the game.
The idea that somehow any decision reached anytime by majority rule is necessarily “democratic” is a perversion of the term. (Editor's note - What is democratic - listening to the minority view? - upper class angst?) Modern democracies have evolved systems of checks and balances to protect the interests of minorities and to avoid making uninformed decisions with catastrophic consequences. The greater and more lasting the decision, the higher the hurdles.
That’s why enacting, say, a constitutional amendment generally requires clearing far higher hurdles than passing a spending bill. Yet the current international standard for breaking up a country is arguably less demanding than a vote for lowering the drinking age.
With Europe now facing the risk of a slew of further breakup votes, an urgent question is whether there is a better way to make these decisions. I polled several leading political scientists to see whether there is any academic consensus; unfortunately, the short answer is no.
For one thing, the Brexit decision may have looked simple on the ballot, but in truth no one knows what comes next after a leave vote. What we do know is that, in practice, most countries require a “supermajority” for nation-defining decisions, not a mere 51%. There is no universal figure like 60%, but the general principle is that, at a bare minimum, the majority ought to be demonstrably stable. A country should not be making fundamental, irreversible changes based on a razor-thin minority that might prevail only during a brief window of emotion. Even if the UK economy does not fall into outright recession after this vote (the pound’s decline might cushion the initial blow), there is every chance that the resulting economic and political disorder will give some who voted to leave “buyers’ remorse.”
Since ancient times, philosophers have tried to devise systems to try to balance the strengths of majority rule against the need to ensure that informed parties get a larger say in critical decisions, not to mention that minority voices are heard. In the Spartan assemblies of ancient Greece, votes were cast by acclamation. People could modulate their voice to reflect the intensity of their preferences, with a presiding officer carefully listening and then declaring the outcome. It was imperfect, but maybe better than what just happened in the UK.
By some accounts, Sparta’s sister state, Athens, had implemented the purest historical example of democracy. All classes were given equal votes (albeit only males). Ultimately, though, after some catastrophic war decisions, Athenians saw a need to give more power to independent bodies.
What should the UK have done if the question of EU membership had to be asked (which by the way, it didn’t)? Surely, the hurdle should have been a lot higher; for example, Brexit should have required, say, two popular votes spaced out over at least two years, followed by a 60% vote in the House of Commons. If Brexit still prevailed, at least we could know it was not just a one-time snapshot of a fragment of the population.
The UK vote has thrown Europe into turmoil. A lot will depend on how the world reacts and how the UK government manages to reconstitute itself. It is important to take stock not just of the outcome, though, but of the process. Any action to redefine a long-standing arrangement on a country’s borders ought to require a lot more than a simple majority in a one-time vote. The current international norm of simple majority rule is, as we have just seen, a formula for chaos.
Saturday, 25 June 2016
In this Brexit vote, the poor turned on an elite who ignored them
Ian Jack in The Guardian
Shipbuilders in Sunderland in the 1980s. Photograph: Sally and Richard Greenhill / Al/Alamy
Just as the pound was reaching its peak, Iain Duncan Smith said: “Turnout in the council estates is very high.” It was about quarter past ten. When he added a few minutes later that he’d been in politics for 24 years and couldn’t remember seeing an equivalent council-estate turnout before, David Dimbleby wondered about its significance: was it good news for the Brexit campaign? Duncan Smith said piously that he couldn’t possibly say, but we knew that he thought it was. By midnight, the pound had begun its fall.
My wife and I grew up on council estates – small, well-gardened ones, a hundred miles from each other across the border of Scotland and England. Almost everyone we knew lived similarly. People of our parents’ generation thought of public housing as a blessing, compared to the shabby and cramped homes they had lived in before. “They talk about council estates as though they’re slums,” my wife said as we watched the coverage. Or native reservations, I thought. Earlier that day on our London high street, a canvasser for remain told me how they divided the work: the Greens got the tube stations, Lib Dems did the shoppers, Labour went “round the estates”.
And, outside Scotland and London, they were mostly ignored. “A large constituency of working-class voters feel that not only has the economy left them behind, but so has the culture,” the American political philosopher Michael Sandel said in a recent interview. “The sources of their dignity, the dignity of labour, have been eroded and mocked by … globalisation, the rise of finance, the attention that is lavished by parties across the political spectrum on economic and financial elites, [and] the technocratic emphasis of the established political parties.” A lot of the energy animating Brexit, said Sandel, had been “born of this failure of elites”.
Just as the pound was reaching its peak, Iain Duncan Smith said: “Turnout in the council estates is very high.” It was about quarter past ten. When he added a few minutes later that he’d been in politics for 24 years and couldn’t remember seeing an equivalent council-estate turnout before, David Dimbleby wondered about its significance: was it good news for the Brexit campaign? Duncan Smith said piously that he couldn’t possibly say, but we knew that he thought it was. By midnight, the pound had begun its fall.
My wife and I grew up on council estates – small, well-gardened ones, a hundred miles from each other across the border of Scotland and England. Almost everyone we knew lived similarly. People of our parents’ generation thought of public housing as a blessing, compared to the shabby and cramped homes they had lived in before. “They talk about council estates as though they’re slums,” my wife said as we watched the coverage. Or native reservations, I thought. Earlier that day on our London high street, a canvasser for remain told me how they divided the work: the Greens got the tube stations, Lib Dems did the shoppers, Labour went “round the estates”.
And, outside Scotland and London, they were mostly ignored. “A large constituency of working-class voters feel that not only has the economy left them behind, but so has the culture,” the American political philosopher Michael Sandel said in a recent interview. “The sources of their dignity, the dignity of labour, have been eroded and mocked by … globalisation, the rise of finance, the attention that is lavished by parties across the political spectrum on economic and financial elites, [and] the technocratic emphasis of the established political parties.” A lot of the energy animating Brexit, said Sandel, had been “born of this failure of elites”.
Sandel refers to a failure common to the western world. But when did the elites begin to fail Britain in particular? An economic historian might point to a period in the late 19th century when Germany overtook Britain in chemical research and technical education and, together with America, began to replace it as the world’s supreme industrial nation. But that was an unconscious failure; active betrayal has come within living memory. As a journalist working in the 1960s and 1970s, I grew used to the story of the factory closure, but only in the 1980s did these apparently random events accumulate to become known by a word, deindustrialisation, that implied a process governments either couldn’t stop, chose not to stop, or took steps to encourage.
The effects across large parts of Britain were spectacular. The big industrial cities had stored up enough capital in terms of public institutions and professional jobs to survive and sometimes prosper as regional capitals. But their hinterlands – the settlements strung along smoky valleys and perched on the oily river’s edge – began to look as abandoned as goldrush towns. Coatbridge, Consett, Hartlepool, Merthyr, Sunderland, Burnley, Greenock, Accrington: unless a senior football team played or a murder took place, they dropped from the national consciousness.
The depth of their oblivion was exemplified when, in a referendum debate on Sky TV, Michael Gove spoke of how his father’s fish business in Aberdeen had been “destroyed by the European Union”, which had “hollowed out” communities across Britain. In fact, a report in the Guardian showed that the senior Gove had sold his business rather than closed it, and that factors other than the EU were then shrinking Aberdeen’s fishing industry, including over-fishing.
What nobody remarked on was the absurdity of Gove calling the EU a job destroyer, when far heavier destruction was inflicted by British government policy during those years. When Mrs Thatcher came to office in 1979, manufacturing accounted for almost 30% of Britain’s national income and employed 6.8 million people; by 2010, it accounted for 11% and employed 2.5 million. And, unlike Mr Gove, a welder who was thrown out of work by a closing Sunderland shipyard had no business to sell.
In no other major economy was industrial collapse so quick. For a time, well-meaning journalists reported the catastrophe, and then gradually the sight of empty towns and shuttered shops became normalised or forgotten.
It seemed there was nothing to be done. At one time, the country’s prosperity had been underpinned by the spinning, weaving, stitching, hammering, banging, welding and smelting that went on in the manufacturing towns; much of the country’s former character was also owed to them – non-conformist chapels, brass bands, giant vegetable championships, self-improvement, association football. Surely nothing as significant to the nation’s economy, culture or politics would ever emerge from them again? And then it did: grievance. Actually, more than that: the sudden discovery that in certain and perhaps unrepeatable circumstances, the poor could use their grievance about all kinds of things to change at least one.
It first became apparent in the Scottish referendum of 2014. Only four local voting areas out of 32 returned a majority for independence and all of them bore the scars of vanished industries. The SNP had broken through years of eroding Labour tradition to capture the loyalty of people in the big housing schemes, for whom the leap in the dark of constitutional change offered promise rather than threat (after all, what else had worked?). By the time of last year’s general election, thousands of underprivileged local authority tenants felt themselves for the first time to be part of a political movement. I noticed the paradox after Nicola Sturgeon addressed an anti-Trident rally in Glasgow, and wrote: “Only now, with the west of Scotland nearly expunged as an economic force, does the political will of its people keep the rest of the country awake.”
On Thursday, much of northern England went to vote in a similar mood. Immigration, actual or potential, mattered too. There may also have been Spitfire enthusiasts. But betrayal, grievance, dispossession: these were surely what counted for most. I feel sorrow that the British story should have such an unexpected end – murdered by the poor and neglected English who were already inside the keep.
The effects across large parts of Britain were spectacular. The big industrial cities had stored up enough capital in terms of public institutions and professional jobs to survive and sometimes prosper as regional capitals. But their hinterlands – the settlements strung along smoky valleys and perched on the oily river’s edge – began to look as abandoned as goldrush towns. Coatbridge, Consett, Hartlepool, Merthyr, Sunderland, Burnley, Greenock, Accrington: unless a senior football team played or a murder took place, they dropped from the national consciousness.
The depth of their oblivion was exemplified when, in a referendum debate on Sky TV, Michael Gove spoke of how his father’s fish business in Aberdeen had been “destroyed by the European Union”, which had “hollowed out” communities across Britain. In fact, a report in the Guardian showed that the senior Gove had sold his business rather than closed it, and that factors other than the EU were then shrinking Aberdeen’s fishing industry, including over-fishing.
What nobody remarked on was the absurdity of Gove calling the EU a job destroyer, when far heavier destruction was inflicted by British government policy during those years. When Mrs Thatcher came to office in 1979, manufacturing accounted for almost 30% of Britain’s national income and employed 6.8 million people; by 2010, it accounted for 11% and employed 2.5 million. And, unlike Mr Gove, a welder who was thrown out of work by a closing Sunderland shipyard had no business to sell.
In no other major economy was industrial collapse so quick. For a time, well-meaning journalists reported the catastrophe, and then gradually the sight of empty towns and shuttered shops became normalised or forgotten.
It seemed there was nothing to be done. At one time, the country’s prosperity had been underpinned by the spinning, weaving, stitching, hammering, banging, welding and smelting that went on in the manufacturing towns; much of the country’s former character was also owed to them – non-conformist chapels, brass bands, giant vegetable championships, self-improvement, association football. Surely nothing as significant to the nation’s economy, culture or politics would ever emerge from them again? And then it did: grievance. Actually, more than that: the sudden discovery that in certain and perhaps unrepeatable circumstances, the poor could use their grievance about all kinds of things to change at least one.
It first became apparent in the Scottish referendum of 2014. Only four local voting areas out of 32 returned a majority for independence and all of them bore the scars of vanished industries. The SNP had broken through years of eroding Labour tradition to capture the loyalty of people in the big housing schemes, for whom the leap in the dark of constitutional change offered promise rather than threat (after all, what else had worked?). By the time of last year’s general election, thousands of underprivileged local authority tenants felt themselves for the first time to be part of a political movement. I noticed the paradox after Nicola Sturgeon addressed an anti-Trident rally in Glasgow, and wrote: “Only now, with the west of Scotland nearly expunged as an economic force, does the political will of its people keep the rest of the country awake.”
On Thursday, much of northern England went to vote in a similar mood. Immigration, actual or potential, mattered too. There may also have been Spitfire enthusiasts. But betrayal, grievance, dispossession: these were surely what counted for most. I feel sorrow that the British story should have such an unexpected end – murdered by the poor and neglected English who were already inside the keep.
Brexit is a wake-up call: save Europe
Natalie Nougayrède in The Guardian
The British vote has dealt an irreparable blow to the European project, and the shock is hard to exaggerate. Yet if there is one mistake EU leaders should avoid now, it would be to think that the forces at play represent a strictly British phenomenon. Twin dynamics have been brutally exposed: the breakdown of the link connecting British voters to elites and institutions – who all argued for remain – and the rapidly fading connection between citizens across the continent and EU institutions.
David Cameron thought victory was his at 10pm on Brexit eve
It’s true that Britain is a special case in Europe. It joined belatedly, and purely for economic reasons. It has had all sorts of opt-outs. For years it fought for and won special statusfor a specific status and it got it in diverse ways. This was a product of Europe’s past – not just of British identity or domestic politics, or even the media environment. Unlike postwar France and Germany, Britain – as Jean Monnet, the father of the EU, acknowledged in his memoirs – “felt no need to exorcise history”.
But this vote is not one that affects Britain alone, and for which just one country will bear the consequences. It puts the cohesion and strength of western liberal democracies at stake in a global environment plagued with uncertainties. Picking up the pieces of this wreckage will require clear-headed decisions and a new approach across Europe. Whether that will happen is now the big uncertainty.
The first thing to avoid is going into denial about the magnitude of what has happened. Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other “exits”. Look at the statements from Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s Front National, and the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – and the messaging from the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
The very survival of the EU is now in peril, and not just because a country representing its second largest economy and a key pillar of its security is set to withdraw. Surely, that much is clear to all. Yet some reactions are already baffling. Angela Merkel has solemnly called for calm. François Hollande has declared that there needs to be a “refoundation” of the EU. Donald Tusk, European council president, quotes Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Martin Schulz, president of the European parliament, believes “the chain reaction being celebrated everywhere now by Eurosceptics won’t happen”.
Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders. ‘Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other ‘exits’.’ Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
The British vote has dealt an irreparable blow to the European project, and the shock is hard to exaggerate. Yet if there is one mistake EU leaders should avoid now, it would be to think that the forces at play represent a strictly British phenomenon. Twin dynamics have been brutally exposed: the breakdown of the link connecting British voters to elites and institutions – who all argued for remain – and the rapidly fading connection between citizens across the continent and EU institutions.
David Cameron thought victory was his at 10pm on Brexit eve
It’s true that Britain is a special case in Europe. It joined belatedly, and purely for economic reasons. It has had all sorts of opt-outs. For years it fought for and won special statusfor a specific status and it got it in diverse ways. This was a product of Europe’s past – not just of British identity or domestic politics, or even the media environment. Unlike postwar France and Germany, Britain – as Jean Monnet, the father of the EU, acknowledged in his memoirs – “felt no need to exorcise history”.
But this vote is not one that affects Britain alone, and for which just one country will bear the consequences. It puts the cohesion and strength of western liberal democracies at stake in a global environment plagued with uncertainties. Picking up the pieces of this wreckage will require clear-headed decisions and a new approach across Europe. Whether that will happen is now the big uncertainty.
The first thing to avoid is going into denial about the magnitude of what has happened. Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other “exits”. Look at the statements from Marine Le Pen, the head of France’s Front National, and the Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders – and the messaging from the Kremlin’s propaganda machine.
The very survival of the EU is now in peril, and not just because a country representing its second largest economy and a key pillar of its security is set to withdraw. Surely, that much is clear to all. Yet some reactions are already baffling. Angela Merkel has solemnly called for calm. François Hollande has declared that there needs to be a “refoundation” of the EU. Donald Tusk, European council president, quotes Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Martin Schulz, president of the European parliament, believes “the chain reaction being celebrated everywhere now by Eurosceptics won’t happen”.
Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders. ‘Now populist, far-right and anti-western forces will push forward in the belief that a precedent has been set for other ‘exits’.’ Photograph: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Stand by for more such delusional talk in the days and weeks to come. Most will betray the angst of damage limitation rather than a recognition that one era has ended and the new is not yet born.
But if there is one lesson, it is that the usual rituals of the EU simply won’t do. Diplomatic choreography won’t be enough to restore what has been shattered, and what the Brexit vote has starkly reflected: there is no longer confidence among European citizens that a collective endeavour of solidarity and values can deliver what they need and want.
The confidence of the lower and middle classes is now closer to zero than it ever has been. Remember recent surveys: only 38% of the French view the EU positively today (the same poll said it was 44% of the British).
The French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote that “history can be divided into three movements: that which moves rapidly, moves slowly and appears not to move at all”. History is now accelerating right before our eyes. It is moving swiftly in a bad direction, and for those who, as I did, witnessed the spread of democracy and the reunification of the continent that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or who were brought up to think that Europe’s future lay in the coming together of its disparate parts, it is an ominous and painful moment.
The British divorce will be messy and drawn out. It will divert energy needed to address other challenges like security, unemployment, migration, and the geopolitical chaos in the EU’s neighbouring regions. It could make it even harder to address the gap that increasingly divides the political elites from the public mood across the continent. Pro-EU politicians are in denial if they think more European integration slogans are the solution. Citizens simply won’t buy it. For more than 10 years now, EU-related referendums have been a disaster. The federalist-minded European constitution project was rejected in 2005, and this year the Netherlands voted against an EU association agreement with Ukraine. Hungary is due to hold a referendum on EU refugee quotas. Expect a no.
If something can be salvaged, the EU needs to rebuild itself from the ground up, not top down. It is a folly to think measures to fix eurozone governance will suffice, however needed those may be. Anyone who has regularly travelled across Europe in recent years and sounded out grassroots perceptions knows that something else is lacking: a sense of purpose, a belief that Europe stands for something positive and that it can act in people’s interest.
The European project was built by a small group of visionary politicians in the 1950s who believed that citizens would over time see its positive impact on their lives. For a long time that’s what happened. And many young people, including in the UK, do grasp the advantages. But for many reasons that link is in danger, and if it is further weakened Europe will unravel. This is the one priority that should obsess those who sit in Brussels and people everywhere who care about preserving fundamental values. If trust and hope are not restored in the notion that the EU can be democratic in its functioning and deliver concrete outcomes to citizens, the Pied Pipers of populism will continue to attract confused electorates. More illiberalism and toxic divisions will seep into the continent. This vote is a wake-up call: Europe needs saving.
The confidence of the lower and middle classes is now closer to zero than it ever has been. Remember recent surveys: only 38% of the French view the EU positively today (the same poll said it was 44% of the British).
The French historian Fernand Braudel once wrote that “history can be divided into three movements: that which moves rapidly, moves slowly and appears not to move at all”. History is now accelerating right before our eyes. It is moving swiftly in a bad direction, and for those who, as I did, witnessed the spread of democracy and the reunification of the continent that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, or who were brought up to think that Europe’s future lay in the coming together of its disparate parts, it is an ominous and painful moment.
The British divorce will be messy and drawn out. It will divert energy needed to address other challenges like security, unemployment, migration, and the geopolitical chaos in the EU’s neighbouring regions. It could make it even harder to address the gap that increasingly divides the political elites from the public mood across the continent. Pro-EU politicians are in denial if they think more European integration slogans are the solution. Citizens simply won’t buy it. For more than 10 years now, EU-related referendums have been a disaster. The federalist-minded European constitution project was rejected in 2005, and this year the Netherlands voted against an EU association agreement with Ukraine. Hungary is due to hold a referendum on EU refugee quotas. Expect a no.
If something can be salvaged, the EU needs to rebuild itself from the ground up, not top down. It is a folly to think measures to fix eurozone governance will suffice, however needed those may be. Anyone who has regularly travelled across Europe in recent years and sounded out grassroots perceptions knows that something else is lacking: a sense of purpose, a belief that Europe stands for something positive and that it can act in people’s interest.
The European project was built by a small group of visionary politicians in the 1950s who believed that citizens would over time see its positive impact on their lives. For a long time that’s what happened. And many young people, including in the UK, do grasp the advantages. But for many reasons that link is in danger, and if it is further weakened Europe will unravel. This is the one priority that should obsess those who sit in Brussels and people everywhere who care about preserving fundamental values. If trust and hope are not restored in the notion that the EU can be democratic in its functioning and deliver concrete outcomes to citizens, the Pied Pipers of populism will continue to attract confused electorates. More illiberalism and toxic divisions will seep into the continent. This vote is a wake-up call: Europe needs saving.
Brexit won’t shield Britain from the horror of a disintegrating EU
Yannis Varoufakis in The Guardian
Leave won because too many British voters identified the EU with authoritarianism, irrationality and contempt for parliamentary democracy while too few believed those of us who claimed that another EU was possible.
I campaigned for a radical remain vote reflecting the values of our pan-European Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). I visited towns in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, seeking to convince progressives that dissolving the EU was not the solution. I argued that its disintegration would unleash deflationary forces of the type that predictably tighten the screws of austerity everywhere and end up favouring the establishment and its xenophobic sidekicks. Alongside John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas, Owen Jones, Paul Mason and others, I argued for a strategy of remaining in but against Europe’s established order and institutions.
‘The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement.’ Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
The only man with a plan is Germany’s finance minister. Schäuble recognises in the post-Brexit fear his great opportunity to implement a permanent austerity union. Under his plan, eurozone states will be offered some carrots and a huge stick. The carrots will come in the form of a small eurozone budget to cover, in some part, unemployment benefits and bank deposit insurance. The stick will be a veto over national budgets.
If I am right, and Brexit leads to the construction of a permanent austerian iron cage for the remaining EU member states, there are two possible outcomes: One is that the cage will hold, in which case the institutionalised austerity will export deflation to Britain but also to China (whose further destabilisation will have secondary negative effects on Britain and the EU).
Another possibility is that the cage will be breached (by Italy or Finland leaving, for instance), the result being Germany’s own departure from the collapsing eurozone. But this will turn the new Deutschmark zone, which will probably end at the Ukrainian border, into a huge engine of deflation (as the new currency goes through the roof and German factories lose international markets). Britain and China had better brace themselves for an even greater deflation shock wave under this scenario.
The horror of these developments, from which Britain cannot be shielded by Brexit, is the main reason why I, and other members of DiEM25, tried to save the EU from the establishment that is driving Europeanism into the ground. I very much doubt that, despite their panic in Brexit’s aftermath, EU leaders will learn their lesson. They will continue to throttle voices calling for the EU’s democratisation and they will continue to rule through fear. Is it any wonder that many progressive Britons turned their back on this EU?
EU referendum full results – find out how your area voted
While I remain convinced that leave was the wrong choice, I welcome the British people’s determination to tackle the diminution of democratic sovereignty caused by the democratic deficit in the EU. And I refuse to be downcast, even though I count myself on the losing side of the referendum.
As of today, British and European democrats must seize on this vote to confront the establishment in London and Brussels more powerfully than before. The EU’s disintegration is now running at full speed. Building bridges across Europe, bringing democrats together across borders and political parties, is what Europe needs more than ever to avoid a slide into a xenophobic, deflationary, 1930s-like abyss.
Leave won because too many British voters identified the EU with authoritarianism, irrationality and contempt for parliamentary democracy while too few believed those of us who claimed that another EU was possible.
I campaigned for a radical remain vote reflecting the values of our pan-European Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25). I visited towns in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, seeking to convince progressives that dissolving the EU was not the solution. I argued that its disintegration would unleash deflationary forces of the type that predictably tighten the screws of austerity everywhere and end up favouring the establishment and its xenophobic sidekicks. Alongside John McDonnell, Caroline Lucas, Owen Jones, Paul Mason and others, I argued for a strategy of remaining in but against Europe’s established order and institutions.
Against us was an alliance of David Cameron (whose Brussels’ fudge reminded Britons of what they despise about the EU), the Treasury (and its ludicrous pseudo-econometric scare-mongering), the City (whose insufferable self-absorbed arrogance put millions of voters off the EU), Brussels (busily applying its latest treatment of fiscal waterboarding to the European periphery), Germany’s finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble (whose threats against British voters galvanised anti-German sentiment), France’s pitiable socialist government, Hillary Clinton and her merry Atlanticists (portraying the EU as part of another dangerous “coalition of the willing") and the Greek government (whose permanent surrender to punitive EU austerity made it so hard to convince the British working class that their rights were protected by Brussels).
The repercussions of the vote will be dire, albeit not the ones Cameron and Brussels had warned of. The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement. Schäuble and Brussels will huff and puff but they will, inevitably, seek such a settlement with London. The Tories will hang together, as they always do, guided by their powerful instinct of class interest. However, despite the relative tranquillity that will follow on from the current shock, insidious forces will be activated under the surface with a terrible capacity for inflicting damage on Europe and on Britain.
Italy, Finland, Spain, France, and certainly Greece, are unsustainable under the present arrangements. The architecture of the euro is a guarantee of stagnation and is deepening the debt-deflationary spiral that strengthens the xenophobic right. Populists in Italy and Finland, possibly in France, will demand referendums or other ways to disengage.
The repercussions of the vote will be dire, albeit not the ones Cameron and Brussels had warned of. The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement. Schäuble and Brussels will huff and puff but they will, inevitably, seek such a settlement with London. The Tories will hang together, as they always do, guided by their powerful instinct of class interest. However, despite the relative tranquillity that will follow on from the current shock, insidious forces will be activated under the surface with a terrible capacity for inflicting damage on Europe and on Britain.
Italy, Finland, Spain, France, and certainly Greece, are unsustainable under the present arrangements. The architecture of the euro is a guarantee of stagnation and is deepening the debt-deflationary spiral that strengthens the xenophobic right. Populists in Italy and Finland, possibly in France, will demand referendums or other ways to disengage.
‘The markets will soon settle down, and negotiations will probably lead to something like a Norwegian solution that allows the next British parliament to carve out a path toward some mutually agreed arrangement.’ Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
The only man with a plan is Germany’s finance minister. Schäuble recognises in the post-Brexit fear his great opportunity to implement a permanent austerity union. Under his plan, eurozone states will be offered some carrots and a huge stick. The carrots will come in the form of a small eurozone budget to cover, in some part, unemployment benefits and bank deposit insurance. The stick will be a veto over national budgets.
If I am right, and Brexit leads to the construction of a permanent austerian iron cage for the remaining EU member states, there are two possible outcomes: One is that the cage will hold, in which case the institutionalised austerity will export deflation to Britain but also to China (whose further destabilisation will have secondary negative effects on Britain and the EU).
Another possibility is that the cage will be breached (by Italy or Finland leaving, for instance), the result being Germany’s own departure from the collapsing eurozone. But this will turn the new Deutschmark zone, which will probably end at the Ukrainian border, into a huge engine of deflation (as the new currency goes through the roof and German factories lose international markets). Britain and China had better brace themselves for an even greater deflation shock wave under this scenario.
The horror of these developments, from which Britain cannot be shielded by Brexit, is the main reason why I, and other members of DiEM25, tried to save the EU from the establishment that is driving Europeanism into the ground. I very much doubt that, despite their panic in Brexit’s aftermath, EU leaders will learn their lesson. They will continue to throttle voices calling for the EU’s democratisation and they will continue to rule through fear. Is it any wonder that many progressive Britons turned their back on this EU?
EU referendum full results – find out how your area voted
While I remain convinced that leave was the wrong choice, I welcome the British people’s determination to tackle the diminution of democratic sovereignty caused by the democratic deficit in the EU. And I refuse to be downcast, even though I count myself on the losing side of the referendum.
As of today, British and European democrats must seize on this vote to confront the establishment in London and Brussels more powerfully than before. The EU’s disintegration is now running at full speed. Building bridges across Europe, bringing democrats together across borders and political parties, is what Europe needs more than ever to avoid a slide into a xenophobic, deflationary, 1930s-like abyss.
Likely Scenarios after the Brexit vote?
By Girish Menon
Now that a majority of Britons have voted to leave the EU, Nigel Farage has denied his claim to fund the NHS, David Cameron has resigned and
the markets have fallen; so what happens next?
Scenario 1: The
Status Quo
The Conservative party will elect a leader who will try to
develop a national consensus on the EU. . S/he will then embark on negotiations
with the EU and this time the spooked EU leaders will concede enough to make a
difference. S/he will conduct another referendum in 1-2 years time and the UK
will continue to be a part of the EU.
Scenario 2: The
Nightmare
True Eurosceptics with strong neoliberal leanings will come
to power. They will fan xenophobic forces to mask the budget cuts to public
services. They will negotiate trade deals from a weak position, dilute workers'
rights and help their rich funders convert England
into another Russia .
Scenario 3: The
Ideal
There will be intense and honest soul searching across the
EU. A realisation will dawn that inequality is the major cause for the rise of
fissiparous forces. The EU will become a transparent organisation with
accountability. It will ensure a Universal and Unconditional Basic Income, Free
Education, Free Health and subsidised Housing for all its citizens.
There could be many more scenarios which will be variations
on the above themes. I hope the EU will choose scenario 3 but as a betting man
I think it will choose scenario 1. The case for scenario 1 becomes stronger as the government is in no hurry to invoke Clause 50 which is the next step to start the Brexit negotiation and Boris Johnson appears subdued after the victory.
Friday, 24 June 2016
Cameron has lost his job – his Teflon cockiness has finally worn off
Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
As the pound plunges and markets slide, remember that this referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. He has lost his gamble – and the country will pay the price
Friday 24 June 2016
Financial chaos, economic crisis, the likely breakaway of Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland: quite a morning’s work for the Bullingdon Club.
Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.
All this from a man who sauntered into the job of prime minister “because I thought I’d be good at it”. He rarely showed any reason for such self-confidence. His plans to modernise the Conservative party crumbled upon first touch with the banking crisis, which forced him and Osborne to reheat the Thatcherite economics they’d imbibed as students. The “big society” turned almost immediately back into the “small state”. At No 10, he launched an austerity drive that was meant to be over within five years, but is now scheduled to go on for double that. Other prime ministers handed power for a long stretch come up with ideas, policies, a style of governing that defines them: Thatcherism, Blairism. What was Cameronism, apart from a hectoring manner at PMQs and an inability to keep on top of detail?
You’ll be reminded endlessly over the next few days how tight this referendum was – that half the country didn’t vote for this. Quite right – and also serious evidence of the weakness of the prime minister. At the last referendum over Britain’s future in Europe, in 1975, Harold Wilson secured a whopping majority. Never a man to ask a question of whose answer he wasn’t absolutely certain, he got a landslide. But when Cameron was handed the full resources of the British state to run this campaign, he still couldn’t count on anything more than a small lead in the polls. A born member of the governing class, he simply wasn’t able to govern.
Not all of this was his creation; much of it is his political inheritance. For the past 40 years, prime minister after prime minister has embraced a regime that has allowed a massive wealth gap to open up between those at the top and the rest of us, that has fattened up central London even while starving other regions of the country – and that has offered the rest of the country elected police chiefs and city mayors instead of an actual voice.
This morning’s results reflect those decades of calculated callousness and the distrust of the political elites they have produced. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron: all pursued an economic inequality – which in turn bred a political and regional polarisation that marked out this referendum campaign. No wonder inner London voted so strongly for the status quo – it’s one of the few places that is doing well out of it. Likewise, it’s no wonder south Wales mutinied, when all the status quo has offered people there for the past four decades is broken promises and rolling immiseration. The shame of it is that all these justified resentments were mobilised by the racists and the hard-rightists. You know things are upside down when the “big merchant banks” are attacked by a former City trader called Nigel Farage.
As prime minister, Cameron had the chance to tackle this toxic mix of inequality and distrust – instead, he made it worse. Leading the remain campaign, he had the chance to address those who had been cut out of the national settlement – instead, he and George Osborne waved around a threat to house prices, even though housing is now this country’s biggest divide between the haves and the have-nots.
In tacit acceptance of his own lack of popular legitimacy, the prime minister invoked the authority of others: the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney; Christine Lagarde at the IMF; the civil servants at the Treasury. Nothing showed up this politician’s own smallness as the technocrats he sheltered behind.
Now he has lost his big gamble and he has lost his job – but it will be the rest of the country that pays the price. He was never that good, he was just cocky. It was never luck, it was just Teflon. And now it’s worn off.
Friday 24 June 2016
Financial chaos, economic crisis, the likely breakaway of Scotland and possibly Northern Ireland: quite a morning’s work for the Bullingdon Club.
Remember as the pound plunges and the markets slide that this entire referendum was called by David Cameron to fend off Nigel Farage and his own Tory ultras. There was no public outcry for a ballot – but for the sake of a bit of internal party management, he called one anyway. He gambled Britain and Europe’s future to shore up his own position. With all the confidence of a member of the Etonian officer class, he thought he’d win. Instead he has bungled so badly that the fallout will drag on for years, disrupting tens of millions of lives across Europe.
All this from a man who sauntered into the job of prime minister “because I thought I’d be good at it”. He rarely showed any reason for such self-confidence. His plans to modernise the Conservative party crumbled upon first touch with the banking crisis, which forced him and Osborne to reheat the Thatcherite economics they’d imbibed as students. The “big society” turned almost immediately back into the “small state”. At No 10, he launched an austerity drive that was meant to be over within five years, but is now scheduled to go on for double that. Other prime ministers handed power for a long stretch come up with ideas, policies, a style of governing that defines them: Thatcherism, Blairism. What was Cameronism, apart from a hectoring manner at PMQs and an inability to keep on top of detail?
You’ll be reminded endlessly over the next few days how tight this referendum was – that half the country didn’t vote for this. Quite right – and also serious evidence of the weakness of the prime minister. At the last referendum over Britain’s future in Europe, in 1975, Harold Wilson secured a whopping majority. Never a man to ask a question of whose answer he wasn’t absolutely certain, he got a landslide. But when Cameron was handed the full resources of the British state to run this campaign, he still couldn’t count on anything more than a small lead in the polls. A born member of the governing class, he simply wasn’t able to govern.
Not all of this was his creation; much of it is his political inheritance. For the past 40 years, prime minister after prime minister has embraced a regime that has allowed a massive wealth gap to open up between those at the top and the rest of us, that has fattened up central London even while starving other regions of the country – and that has offered the rest of the country elected police chiefs and city mayors instead of an actual voice.
This morning’s results reflect those decades of calculated callousness and the distrust of the political elites they have produced. Thatcher, Blair, Cameron: all pursued an economic inequality – which in turn bred a political and regional polarisation that marked out this referendum campaign. No wonder inner London voted so strongly for the status quo – it’s one of the few places that is doing well out of it. Likewise, it’s no wonder south Wales mutinied, when all the status quo has offered people there for the past four decades is broken promises and rolling immiseration. The shame of it is that all these justified resentments were mobilised by the racists and the hard-rightists. You know things are upside down when the “big merchant banks” are attacked by a former City trader called Nigel Farage.
As prime minister, Cameron had the chance to tackle this toxic mix of inequality and distrust – instead, he made it worse. Leading the remain campaign, he had the chance to address those who had been cut out of the national settlement – instead, he and George Osborne waved around a threat to house prices, even though housing is now this country’s biggest divide between the haves and the have-nots.
In tacit acceptance of his own lack of popular legitimacy, the prime minister invoked the authority of others: the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney; Christine Lagarde at the IMF; the civil servants at the Treasury. Nothing showed up this politician’s own smallness as the technocrats he sheltered behind.
Now he has lost his big gamble and he has lost his job – but it will be the rest of the country that pays the price. He was never that good, he was just cocky. It was never luck, it was just Teflon. And now it’s worn off.
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