Brexit: the myth of British superiority

The arrogance behind British nationalism is not supported by facts

One of the nationalistic-xenophobic assumptions of Brexiters is that Britain is in some way ‘better’ than its European neighbours, and, for that reason, should not be in a union with them. How else could the following comment on passports by the pro-Brexit Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell be interpreted?

“The humiliation of having a pink [sic] European Union passport will now soon be over and the United Kingdom nationals can once again feel pride and self-confidence in their own nationality when travelling…”

However, the myth of British superiority is worth probing with a few comparative facts, contrasting Britain with its immediate European neighbours. Let me take these to be Ireland, France, Germany, Benelux (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg) and Scandinavia, all democracies since the Second World War. It is worth noting that this group of countries, including Britain, contains a majority of the EU’s population and wealth.

Among these countries, according to the IMF in 2017, Britain is the poorest in GNP per head, with $ 43 500 per year – only marginally below France, but well below Germany on $ 49 800. The smaller countries of Benelux, Ireland and Scandinavia are all considerably richer. And by the end of 2017, as a consequence of Brexit, Britain’s economic growth is lagging behind that of Eurozone, exacerbating rather than reducing the difference.

For working people, their situation is even worse than their mainland European counterparts. Britain is the most economically unequal, with inequality at an index of 34, while France and Germany both score 29. (To understand these figures, zero represents complete equality, while inequality in the United States stands at 40.)

In fact, Britain is more unequal today than at any point since the middle of the nineteenth century; And with welfare cuts in a deteriorating economy, inequality is growing further in the UK. In absolute terms, in the period 2009-16, a massive 70% of households experienced stagnation or a drop in income.

Inequality is linked to a dysfunctional society. Just to take one example, in every 100 000 people, Germany imprisons 81, France 118, but Britain a staggering 150.

If the current situation is bad, the future is worse. Brexit is already causing capital investment to avoid Britain, and for business to relocate out of the country. The prospect of trade barriers after March 2019 further impedes the economy. The Tory Brexit elite, with a whip hand in the May government, want to spurn the European social-market model all together and fall into step with the US economy. After the shocks of EU withdrawal, they seek a society of low taxes, minimal rights for workers and consumers, with little or no social welfare - a European America or a Singapore on the Thames.

The outlook is grim.

"British Jobs for British Workers” is a xenophobic and racist slogan

"British Jobs for British Workers” is a xenophobic and racist slogan: the left can debunk it.

In the 2016 EU referendum, opposing the migration of workers from central and eastern Europe into Britain was the key issue for many Leave voters, and one which was highlighted by the xenophobic UKIP party. The Leavers’ arguments were as simple as they were wrong. They said the the migrant workers took away ‘our’ jobs, depress wages and put pressure on housing and other social services. Moreover, they undermine the cultural homogeneity of ‘our’ country.

Essentially this xenophobic/racist argument is the same as the one used to oppose and discriminate against the Catholic Irish in the nineteenth century, Jews escaping pogroms at the beginning of the twentieth, blacks from the West Indies and Asians from Africa and the Indian subcontinent in the post-war period. By contrast, the British moving abroad for economic reasons are never labelled as migrants, but as ‘expats.’

It is completely correct to oppose this racism, to point out that the economy is boosted by young, migrant workers and to defend EU freedom of movement as an essential liberty. But in opposing racist lies, we shouldn’t blind ourselves to truths lurking behind the racist propaganda.

Let’s take a hypothetical case to illustrate the point. What is the sense of school cleaners in an English town commuting monthly from Romania? The workers live in appalling overcrowded conditions and receive no more than the minimum wage, while indigenous people in the town join the lines of the unemployed. At the same time a pressure is put on the local housing stock. Do circumstances such as these prove the xenophobes’ argument?

Not at all. The situation in that English town would be no different if the cleaners came not from Romania, but from Scotland or another part of Britain. The effects on local resources and local unemployment would be the same. The issue for certain jobs is not, as the racists claim, “British jobs for British workers,” but local jobs for local people. There is nothing wrong in principle in offering employment first to people who have lived in the area for a certain amount of time. Nationality has nothing to do with it. If a Romanian has lived in the town for say two years, s/he is at the front of the queue. The Brit from the other end of the country is not.

Once we accept in principle the idea of local jobs for local people in certain limited instances, we solve much of the ‘legitimate’ complaint and reveal the xenophobic and racist character of the slogan, “British jobs for British workers.”

Are the British UKIP and the American Trump fascists?

The fascistic aspects of UKIP and Trump are not enough to label them fascists

Talk on the left often compares the anti-liberal xenophobic nationalism behind Brexit and Trump with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Is the comparison valid?

Some similarities clearly exist: the attack on liberal values, on rational expertise and cosmopolitanism, through a promotion of ethnic chauvinism, authoritarian nationalism and economic protectionism; and all of this tied up with a vision of a utopian future created out of an imagined past. These ideas do contain elements of fascism, so the label ‘fascistic” could be legitimately applied to the thinking and also to those who promote it.

Yet outside eastern Europe, the populist right has worked within, rather than threatened, democratic structures – and the mainstream populist right have so far not engaged in a cult of organised violence against their domestic opponents. Thus attaching terms like fascist, let alone Nazi, to UKIP and similar parties would be inaccurate.

But, of course, the world today is different from that of the 1930s. Then the workers’ movement was a powerful contender for power; now it is not. Business, today, much of it multinational, does not need nationalist extremists to protect its interests against a weak and largely unorganised working class. So the far right’s main opponent is bourgeois liberalism, not socialism or communism; and therefore its configuration and tactics are different.

But the lesson of the Nazi assumption of power should teach us one thing. Weimar democracy was far from perfect, but Germany until 1933 was a civilised country. In a relatively short time the Nazi regime was able create a chamber of horrors with the complicity of the existing state apparatus. The vulnerability of liberal democracy should never be underestimated. Who would have thought a year ago that EU citizens in the UK, many who have been resident for years, would be be reduced to bargaining chips in the May government’s Brexit negotiations?

A national government for Britain in 2015?

Every time the political situation in Britain is not straightforward, there are voices saying that there will be a return to national government, last seen 1931-45.

Of course anything in the future can happen, but it seems highly likely that following the 2015 General Election in May this year either the Tories or Labour will emerge as the single largest party in Parliament with the other in second position. By British convention the party with the largest number of seats will be invited to form a government, and if not successful the remit will fall to second party. It is highly improbable that neither Cameron nor Miliband would be unable to form a government which would not immediately fall in a parliamentary vote of no confidence. UKIP and the Northern Ireland Unionists would lean towards the Tories, while the SNP (likely to emerge as a major player in 2015) along with Plaid Cymru and the Greens (if they win seats) would favour Labour. The Liberal Democrats would get into bed with anyone, and it is unlikely after an electoral beating in May 2015 they would want a second general election.

In any event, a coalition only between the Tories and Labour would be, to borrow German terminology, a “grand coalition,” not a national government. Such a government, if only because it was so unexpected and would deny the voters any say in the direction of the country, would be unpopular and would soon haemorrhage support to the left (mainly the Greens, but also the SNP in Scotland) and to the right (UKIP). Recent opinion polls put support for a Tory/Lab coalition as the preferred outcome of a hung parliament at a mere 9 percent. Anticipating low levels of public support and votes falling away, a grand coalition would be the last choice for both Cameron and Miliband, or their successors.

A “national government” is not impossible, but it is highly unlikely.

UKIP on the rise?

UKIP is raising its profile as Britain’s fourth largest political party.

The growth of UKIP is an aspect of the increasing fragmentation of political identity among voters that has been taking place in the last half century.

What seems to be happening on the right is that the Tory Party, as an alliance of business interests and nationalistic/chauvinistic prejudices, is coming apart, with the Union Jack wavers now gravitating to UKIP.

The left, too, might fragment, if the Green Party moves out of its current niche.

If political fragmentation proceeds apace – boosted by PR in the EU elections – we might wonder at what point the current first-past-the-post electoral system for the House of Commons becomes utterly dysfunctional.


.

Europe after socialism and social democracy

With the demise of socialism and social democracy in Europe a new politics is coming into existence.

Is a new pattern of political alignment appearing in Europe? On 31 May Peter Spiegel wrote in The Financial Times:

“We may be witnessing a generational change in European political dynamics. Traditional left-right divisions have narrowed… In its place, we are seeing a new division, between globalisers and localisers. The urban elites on both the left (intellectuals, liberal internationalists) and the right (free traders, global business leaders) face a challenge to their postwar consensus from a new group of revanchists. This political force also comes from both the left (trade unionists, working-class whites) and the right (rural nationalists, far-right xenophobes).”

How does an observation such as Spiegel's fit with a Marxist conception of society? I think it must be something like this:

While a particular system of class relations (i.e. owners of capital versus people who can only acquire the means to live by selling their labour power) is a concomitant of any kind of capitalism, political ideologies and identities within and across social classes under capitalism vary over time and from place to place. In other words, in different capitalist societies or in one society at different times, the politics can be markedly different.

That said, in Europe at least in the twentieth century, the major political division that ran though society tended to mirror class relations. Large numbers of working class people identified with the parties of the left, communist and social democratic, while non-socialist parties, liberal or conservative, had their base among capitalists, managers and professional people. This political division based on social class grew and became sharper, at least until the mid 1970s.

The strength of the left across Europe in post war Europe tended to force all non-socialist factions into an electoral alliance against the left. With the demise of the left since the end of the twentieth century, the raison d’etre for that anti-socialist unity has attenuated, so different currents of non-socialist opinion can again compete against each other in the political sphere.

How then is the right dividing? We can see nationalistic elements breaking away from the main parties of the right. The mainstream right remains attached to running a globalised capitalism within a liberal democratic framework, while the nationalist right attempts to rally "the people" against outsiders, immigrants, the EU, etc.. In Britain, this phenomenon is to some extent straitjacketed by the first-past-the-post electoral system, which favours a duopoly of political parties. Nonetheless, the continued electoral existence of the UK Independence Party, UKIP, shows the trend.

The left, once a coalition between socialism and progressive liberalism, is splitting along the same lines as the right. Political liberalism, internationalist in outlook, retains its hold within much of the intelligentsia, but this cosmopolitan movement is ever more at odds with illiberal and parochialising tendencies, now masquerading as the British left. I will mention two here: so-called Blue Labour and multiculturalism.

Following New Labour’s 2010 election defeat, a movement has developed within the Labour Party to shift the party’s image from urbanite Middle England to a kind of political “Chavism” – or what is increasingly called Blue Labour. In essence, this an attempt to steal some of the clothes of the fascistic right and incorporate them in Labour’s image; e.g. promoting nationalism, scapegoating immigrants, being tough on crime, etc. Authoritarian populism of this kind is epitomised by the New Labour ex-Communist former Home Secretary John Reid.

Multiculturalism, meaning the use of the state to facilitate and maintain separate cultural identities, may run counter to the ideas of Blue Labour, but it has nothing to do with either political liberalism or socialism. Under multiculturalism, just as under a mono-cultural system, the rights of individuals are trumped by the demands of traditional cultural groups and their governing hierarchies. In a mono-cultural society one culture supposedly binds everybody within a state; in multiculturalism your ethnic origin determines which community norms bind you. One only has to look at the growth of faith schools in Britain to see this in action.

That the leading dynamic on the “left” has become a battle between two parochial and illiberal currents, Blue Labour and multiculturalism, is itself proof the demise of socialism and social democracy.

The main conclusion to arise from the short essay is that the heart of the left, the symbiosis of political liberalism and the struggle for socio-economic equality, seems to have fallen off the agenda. Socialists can today only choose the least worst option from what remains.

Face the issue of the EU head-on

I think Britain should confront the EU issue head on.

There should be a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the EU, rather than claiming opposition in principle to everything the Union proposes and then demanding an opt-out when something has been decided.

My belief and hope is that the people would, as in 1975, back continued membership, if only because the psychological, practical and economic effect of withdrawal would be disastrous for Britain.

With the issue of membership out of the way (and UKIP and the Tory right marginalised), Britain could work with and within the EU to achieve its interests.