26 February 2018

Brexit: Blair paved the way

The policies of Tony Blair and New Labour paved the way for Brexit.

Tony Blair is rightly loathed. For the left, Blair takes pride of place among the Judas Iscariots, Vidkun Quislings and Ramsey MacDonalds. But should we re-evaluate him in light of his opposition to Brexit? Can the progressive left share a platform with this war criminal? The answer is a resounding no on multiple grounds. But one basic reason, often not singled out, is that Blair did more than anyone else to pave the way for the disastrous referendum result of June 2016. How is that so?

The New Labour government took steps to make sure that the UK became a Mecca for central and east European casual workers. In 2004, ten states, mostly former ‘socialist’ countries, joined the EU. Britain was one of only three (the other two were Ireland and Sweden) that immediately permitted workers from the new member states to take up employment in Britain’s weakly regulated employment market. Blair’s reasons were seemingly simple: to provide labour in Britain’s credit boom economy, keep wages down and see xenophobia prevent a united working class response to growing inequality.

As New Labour embraced marketisation, praised wealthy oligarchs, ciritised and privatised the public sector and marginalised trade unions, economic inequality continued to grow. Blair did not give birth to the ‘left behind’ in the post-industrial wastelands; Thatcher had already done that. But he did take away hope that Labour could make a difference to the lives of ordinary working people. As hope evaporated, especially following the financial crisis of 2008, anomic anger exploded and the 2016 referendum provided an outlet for that anger for the Barnsleys, Stokes and Hartlepools.

But even so why did so many in Britain think the UK was different and better, so that it could profitably stand alone, while the rest of Europe needed the EU? After all, economic analysis suggests the exact opposite. Post imperial illusions played a part, but the single biggest injection of national arrogance were Blair’s wars around the globe. With the exception of France, Britain is the only military power in the EU. And Blair, locked in an alliance with the US, loved military might. With Gordon Brown in tow, he promoted militarism, relished it, thereby bolstering the myth of British difference, superiority and strength.

And Blair’s was also responsible for Brexit for what he didn’t do. In 2002 he could have overcome Brown’s opposition and taken the UK into the Euro. Yes, had other things been the same, Britain would have had a worse recession in 2008, but Brexit would have been just too difficult to contemplate in 2016.

So when Blair gets up to put the case for reversing Brexit - and he does so rather eloquently - we should remember his role in bringing it about. In this, as in everything else, Blair is the consummate hypocrite.

4 February 2018

Brexit: a affront to progressive values

The ideology behind Brexit is an affront to the values of progressive the left.

We often tend to think of Brexit only in terms of its adverse legal and economic consequences. Yet, the meaning of Brexit is more than just junking a set of legal arrangements between the UK and twenty-seven other European states. Brexitism, if I can coin that term, and the whole set of discourses which sustain it, are based on a frontal assault on the core values of the political left. These values inter alia are:

1. Universalism: the idea that people, irrespective of nation, religion or ethnicity, are of equal worth and should have the same rights and responsibilities.

2. Cosmopolitanism: the idea that the mixing of cultures has the potential to enrich, rather than undermine.

3. Liberalism: the idea that it not, in the first instance, up to society or the state to tell people how to live, but people should be able to do their own thing, providing they do not undermine the same right for others.

Brexit is an affront to each of those values. It addresses itself to the particularism of one people, not to people as people. It accredits value to one culture, a supposed Britishness and seeks to shut out others from its space. And it undermines the right of choice: the locking in or locking out of people at British borders - and by implication the persecution of those who straddle them.

Ukipery circulated the virus of Brexitism, which took hold - principly among England's non-metropolitan middle class and in its post-industrial wastelands and rotting seaside resorts - to such an extent that it won a majority of the voting electorate in June 2016. But today that virus has spread to take hold of the Conservative Party and government. It is present in what we might call National Labour, too (e.g. Frank Field, Kate Hoey, et al.) and casts a long shadow over Labour as a whole. In short, it is a pollutant across British society.

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2015 was the biggest victory for the Left in Britain in a generation, but we need to make sure sure that Corbynism promotes universalism, cosmopolitanism and liberalism at the heart of its political thinking.