You still don’t get it do you? Europe doesn’t want you back

It is hard to underestimate the shock of the Brexit vote last Thursday.  Nobody expected it… and I mean nobody.  Even Farage had conceded defeat by 11.00pm on Thursday night.  Come Friday morning, the reason pro-Brexit Tories like Johnson and Gove look so glum was that the British people had just handed them a live hand grenade – this was meant to be political theatre in which Vote Leave would graciously lose, and Johnson could go back to his party and say, “well I tried.  Give me the leadership and we’ll do better next time.”  Not for a moment did these people think they were actually going to have to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

Since Friday – with the exception of the Parliamentary Labour Party; who have decided that now is the right time to put sordid self-interest ahead of addressing the biggest national crisis since Dunkirk – British politics has been taken up with damage limitation.  Prominent Vote Leave campaigners have made clear that they have absolutely no idea what Brexit means, still less a plan for carrying it out.  Leave voters across the country have come forward to explain that they had only intended their vote as a protest.  Labour MP David Lammy has called for Parliament to end the insanity by simply refusing to accept the referendum result.  LibDem leader Tim Farron has promised to stand at the next election on a manifesto to overturn the Brexit vote.  In the media, even arch-Eurosceptics like the Sun’s Kelvin MacKenzie are regretting voting to leave on what has turned out to be an entirely false prospectus.

On the Brexit side of the vote, victory has descended into outbreaks of racial abuse, as foreign nationals have been told to pack their bags and f*** off home!  Britain has held a mirror up to its face and the picture we have seen is ugly and dangerous.

Many of the 48.1% of people who voted to Remain are outraged.  In Scotland, the most likely result is a new independence referendum as the only mechanism for keeping Scotland in the EU.  In the metropolitan cities of England and Wales there have been big pro-EU demonstrations.  Campaign groups have been formed with the explicit aim of overturning the Brexit vote.

In all of this British naval gazing, one ominous fact is being overlooked: THE EU DOES NOT WANT BRITAIN!  That’s right; the EU has reached the end of its tether.  For 40 years they have had to put up with British exceptionalism – opt-outs here, rebates there, and all the while British politicians and journalists blaming all of the ills of their collapsing society on Brussels. 

Although European governments are as concerned about the economic damage caused by the Brexit vote, they at least had the wit to prepare for it.  In Britain, we can thank Bank of England officials for developing contingency measures that an arrogant Prime Minister simply assumed would never be needed.  But there are always advantages in an economic crisis if you can position yourself correctly.  France will be delighted by Britain’s departure – and not just because of all the bad blood from Crecy to Waterloo.  In the EU as currently constituted France is the junior partner among the big three EU economies (Germany, Britain and France).  Take out Britain and the EU becomes a Franco-German duopoly.  Germany – by far the strongest economy in Europe has always looked enviously at the primacy of the City of London as Europe’s financial centre.  With Britain out of the way, and the City no longer bolstered by the economic stability of the single market, Frankfurt can finally emerge as the 21^st century financial capital of Europe.

When German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the world yesterday that: “We can see no way to turn this around.  It's not a time for wishful thinking, but of contemplating the reality” she was not making a legal case.  In fact there are 1001 legal means of preventing withdrawal from the EU from happening.  What Mrs Merkel was really saying was “Don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out.”  Quite simply, even if British politicians attempt to find a means of reversing the referendum result, EU leaders are not going to allow it – the people have spoken; you must abide by their decision.

The EU is not going to dance to Britain’s tune any more.  As things stand, Britain is clinging by its finger nails to its access to the single market.  It is only the clause that says it has to be Britain that triggers an Article 50 withdrawal that is keeping us there.  EU leaders will bring all the pressure they can to bear upon the next Prime Minister to fire the starting gun as soon as possible.   As Jean-Claude Juncker said yesterday, the next Prime Minister will be given just days to trigger Article 50.  Once that happens, the choice facing Britain is stark – either sign up to all of the things that the referendum result was opposed to – without having a seat at the decision making table – or go trade with someone else.

So that’s it.  Britain is out of the EU.  Not because millions of ordinary Britons wanted it that way, but because given the choice between a union of 27 countries plus one eternal whinger and a union of 27 countries abiding by the same rules, the EU has chosen the latter.

Twenty-six years ago, Britain’s biggest selling newspaper stood on the white cliffs at Dover, put two fingers up toward Europe and shouted “Up Yours Delors” to the then EU Commission President.  Today, Jacques Delors’ children are stood on the white cliffs at Calais returning the complement.  It turns out that it isn’t foreigners who will have to f*** off home… it’s us.

We voted for it; but what – exactly – does Brexit mean?

Why did 52 percent of us vote for Brexit last Thursday?  Although most media attention has focused on immigration, according to a poll by Lord Ashcroft, this was only the second reason given by those who voted to leave.  More important was the belief that decisions about the UK should be taken by the UK.  The third most popular reason was that voting to remain entailed having little choice about how the EU expanded its membership and powers in the future.

Given these concerns, we might expect that the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign would have a blueprint for how these aims are to be achieved now that Britain has indeed voted for Brexit.  Unfortunately, it turns out that there was no such plan – Leave campaigners argued that it was up to 10 Downing Street to create one.  However, the Prime Minister has resigned and is reported to have asked colleagues “why should I stick around to do the hard stuff?”

A small Cabinet Office team (dubbed “the Brexit unit” by the media) has now been assembled to work under Oliver Letwin to sketch out the steps required to trigger an Article 50 notification that will officially inform the EU of Britain’s intention to leave, and will begin the process of establishing the terms under which Britain will leave – note that this is a very long way from a final exit from the EU, which some expect to take a decade or more.

Ideally, before Article 50 is officially triggered, the new Prime Minister will want at least a broad outline of the kind of relationship with the EU Britain will want to negotiate.  This is likely to require a general election to provide the new Prime Minister with the legitimacy to develop a negotiating stance.  The trouble is that unless Article 50 is triggered before a general election, the election is likely to end up being about whether or not to trigger Article 50 at all – if the opposition won on pro-EU manifestos, this would give them the necessary legitimation to overturn the result of the referendum itself.

So the new Prime Minister will have just weeks to decide what Britain’s relationship with the EU is to be after Brexit.  The three options on the table are some modification of:

1. The Norwegian model in which Britain continues to participate in the single market through the European Economic Area. 
2. The Swiss model in which Britain attempts to access the single market by negotiating new bi-lateral trade treaties with each of the remaining 27 EU member states.  The Swiss have been working on their unfinished version of this for the best part of seven decades.
3. World Trade Organisation rules in which Britain effectively tears up all existing rules and seeks a preferred trading status similar to Turkey or Ukraine.

In practice, the first option is worse than ignoring the referendum result, since it entails operating by EU rules over which Britain will have ceded control, continuing to pay into the EU budget, and continuing to allow the free movement of people.  The second option may be little better, since an embittered EU has no incentive to ease Britain’s exit given that this may encourage others to consider referendums of their own.  It may well be that the free movement of people will be a red line issue for any of the EU member states Britain seeks treaties with.

In reality, then, the only option that guarantees that the result of the referendum is enacted is the one in which Britain tears up every agreement that it has entered into in the course of the last 40 years.  That option, unfortunately, is simply insane.

On the international stage, Britain is party to hundreds of international treaties signed by the EU.  Each of these would have to be renegotiated separately by Britain with each of the other signatories.  Nationally, conservative estimates suggest that parliament and the civil service could be tied up for a decade.  As Alex Barker and Alan Beattie in the Financial Times report:

“Senior officials see the untangling of 40 years of EU membership as something akin to a legal “revolution” that would dominate the Queen’s speech for the next five to 10 years.

“This includes deciding what to keep, amend or reject from thousands of EU related laws on the UK statute book and 12,295 regulations that have direct effect and would cease to apply the moment the UK leaves.”

Simply scrapping the European Communities Act 1972 – as suggested by some Vote Leave campaigners – without first updating all of the EU-based law first would leave every business in Britain trading illegally until such time as replacement British law was enacted.  For example:

“Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, points out that much of the trading done in the City of London would overnight become illegal unless new provision were made. The process of reviewing this legislation — working out what to keep, what to amend, and what to remove — would be lengthy, complex, and contested.”

Beyond this written legislation is all of the case law that has developed over four decades.  Philip Kolvin QC sets out the scope of the law related to leaving the EU:

“The consequences for our legal system have barely figured in [the debate on Brexit]. But EU-inspired or mandated legislation is part of the bedrock of societal protection. I speak of health and safety, town and country planning, ecological protection, freedom of information, data protection, competition, discrimination, public procurement, indeed the very concept of proportionality which governs much of our regulatory system. Are these protections to be thrown onto a bonfire of laws? If not, which are to survive and which are to be replaced, and if so by what?”

Presumably, the status quo will have to remain for the decade (or more likely decades) while all of this law is being re-written.  And any changes will have to go through the usual Parliamentary processes... hardly the "scrapping EU bureaucracy" that most Leave voters had in mind.

The effect on future law making is going to be disastrous if large numbers of civil servants have to be relocated to the Brexit Unit to carry out the nuts and bolts of renegotiating and redrafting Britain's legal framework.  Bear in mind that the Civil Service has been parred to the bone as part of the government’s austerity programme.  Trade negotiations will pose significant difficulties, since most of Britain's international trade specialists retired more than thirty years ago because EU membership meant that they were no longer needed.  It might be possible to bring in outside contractors to take on some of the extra work, but this also has its problems, since the multinational law and accountancy firms with the spare capacity to take on this work may prefer more lucrative contracts with the 27 EU member states that Britain is seeking to negotiate with.

Beyond having to spend an inordinate amount of money (perhaps no bad thing if it stimulates the wider economy) time and effort on unpicking and redrafting the best part of 40 years of International and British law, it is far from clear what, exactly, Brexit means.  Ironically for the large racist contingent among Brexit voters, the one thing it does not affect is the status of EU citizens already living in Britain.  Their rights are guaranteed by United Nations treaties that Britain entered into in the aftermath of World War Two.  Quite simply, unless the Brexit camp are prepared to turn Britain into a rogue state – with all the trade sanctions and the potential threat of military action that this would entail – nobody is being deported or forcibly removed.  Indeed, the likely consequence of Brexit is that even more people will obtain joint EU/UK citizenship.

It is far from clear what people thought they were voting for when they voted to leave.  It is even less clear what sort of settlement Britain will eventually reach many years from now.  What is clear is that most Leave voters are going to be sourly disappointed by the end result in any case.

Our UKIP future?

If you were looking for one individual responsible for Thursday’s Brexit vote, you could do a lot worse than single out Neil Kinnock.  It was Kinnock – faced with a wave of working class unrest in the face of a callous Thatcher government – who decided that it was easier to ward off dissent with rule changes rather than arguments.  Beginning the process of disconnecting the Labour leadership from its grass roots, Kinnock lit the fuse than exploded last week.  Kinnock’s reforms paved the way for the war criminal Blair – whose endorsement of the Remain campaign added at least 10% to the Brexit vote.

The harbingers of Thursday’s result were there for anyone who cared to look.  The draining away of the Labour vote (hidden by the lack of a credible Tory party) after the 2001 election.  The rise of the LibDems as a protest vehicle for disgruntled ex-Labour voters in 2010.  The annihilation of Labour in Scotland and the rise of UKIP in the Labour’s former urban and ex-industrial heartlands.  For the most part, Labour MPs had been able to ignore these storm clouds because support among the metropolitan middle classes and the vagaries of the First Past the Post electoral system worked to keep them in office.  But faced with a referendum in which every vote counted, the mass of disenfranchised working class voters took the opportunity to kick the political elite in the only way on offer – Despite the calls of the Labour leadership, the Tory high command, the leaders of big business and high finance, the chose Brexit.

The Parliamentary Labour Party’s (PLP) choice to commit ritual suicide by removing Jeremy Corbyn as leader does nothing to win back the mass of people who voted for Brexit; not least because the PLP is staunchly pro-remain.  Quite rightly, working class voters will see the attempt to change leader as a precursor to ditching the referendum result.  And beyond this, the idea that an already out of touch PLP is going to win seats in constituencies that have long-since ceased being pro-Labour is fantasy.  By removing Corbyn, all they are doing is divesting the party of tens of thousands of metropolitan activists.

In these circumstances, outside Scotland, UKIP is well placed to take swathes of Labour seats in Britain’s most depressed regions.  In this, they will be ably assisted by Boris Johnson who, if he becomes the next Prime Minister, will actively seek to overturn the referendum result.  Johnson’s backsliding over immigration controls; remaining in the single market; and continuing to pay into the EU smack of a betrayal of Brexit voters that is unlikely to be forgiven.

This creates the grounds for an In v Out election in the autumn. 

An election is inevitable given the tiny majority that Johnson will inherit if he becomes leader.  But to heal the division within the Tory party, Johnson will have to back pedal on all of the promises made during the referendum campaign. Labour, under their new leader, will also be fighting on a pro-remain ticket.  But unlike during the referendum campaign, by ditching Corbyn they will have lost many of the activists they depend upon to turn out their voters.

Given the peculiarity of their situation, the Scottish National Party will bolster their support north of the border.  In England and Wales, however, UKIP will emerge as the only pro-Brexit party that voters can rely upon to protect last Thursday’s result.

Close on the heels of such a major political upheaval, it is inconceivable that the Brexit vote is simply going to go back into passivity – staying at home and allowing Labour and the Tories to slug it out.  While the pro-remain vote (already a minority) will be split between Labour, the LibDems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and the Tory party; the Brexit vote will gravitate to the one party they can be sure will protect the Brexit result.

As we learned in the course of the referendum campaign, jumping up and down and shouting the word “racist” at the top of your voice does absolutely nothing to deter people from voting for a right-wing proposition.  Clearly extolling the virtues of remaining in the EU is not going to work.  Only a serious package of reforms aimed at reversing the growing inequality of the past 40 years can prevent the mass of the working class staying with UKIP.

It is unlikely that UKIP will be in a position to form a government in October.  This said had Britain voted under a proportional electoral system in 2015, we would now have a Tory-UKIP coalition government.  That coalition is a very real possibility in the event of an autumn election… I don’t like it, but I can see no way of avoiding it.

Biggest crisis since Suez? Not even close!

A single word sums up the entire Brexit referendum from start to finish: COMPLACENCY:

• Complacency on the part of David Cameron for including an EU referendum in the 2015 Tory manifesto solely to prevent Tory voters defecting to UKIP. 
• Complacency too in assuming that the coalition with the LibDems would continue, and the referendum promise could be negotiated away as part of a new coalition agreement.
• Complacency on the part of Angela Merkel for unilaterally inviting a million refugees into the EU without considering how this might affect public opinion elsewhere.
• Complacency on the part of the EU leaders who, facing financial and social problems of their own were in no mood to pander to yet more British whinging, still less provide Cameron with genuine EU reforms.
• Complacency on the part of Cameron for assuming that he could sell the non-deal he negotiated with the EU to an increasingly sceptical British public.
• Complacency on the part of the national media – and particularly the BBC – for presenting the entire referendum as a Westminster bubble, “blue on blue” spat to which – as is usually the case with elections – ordinary British people were not invited.
• Complacency on the part of world leaders and establishment figures from Barak Obama and his paymaster Jamie Dimon down to financial industry flunkies like Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling for believing that one warning from them would be enough to send a frightened British public running in their droves to vote for the status quo.
• Complacency on the part of the media and the Parliamentary Labour Party for believing there was no need to improve Jeremy Corbyn’s standing by setting him front and centre of a campaign that had to deliver working class votes.
• Complacency, less obviously, on the part of the UKIP leadership who never for a minute dreamed that the British people might actually believe the simplistic oppositional promises that were intended solely to boost their numbers on the EU/Westminster/local and regional government gravy trains.
• Complacency on the part of loony right wing posh boys like Gove and Johnson who, for entirely selfish reasons set about the campaign like a public school debating society exercise in which they were not required to actually believe and of the nonsense issuing from their months, but merely sow sufficient doubt about their opponent’s arguments.

What nobody seemed to notice was that the neoliberal economic project that began in the 1970s had slowly but remorselessly cast aside increasing numbers of ordinary people.  The new globalised economy took ordinary people who had been able to buy a home and raise a family on a single workers’ wage and cast them onto the scrap heap.  All of the temporary fixes – both partners working; lowering living costs by importing cheap goods; taking on unsustainable debt – failed one by one until all but the top 10 percent were still benefiting. For decades, the Westminster elite and the metropolitan middle classes had been studiously ignoring the growing numbers of down and outs piling up in the shop doorways they passed on their way to get their morning lattes.  Out of sight, a mass of people on the losing side of society had been festering in social housing ghettos from which there is no way out.

Labour’s decision to make these people pay the cost of the 2008 banking crash undoubtedly sealed the result of the referendum.  The warning signs have been clear enough to anyone who chose to look since then.  The LibDem becoming a depository for protesting ex-Labour voters in 2010, coupled to a large number who stayed at home propelled Cameron into Downing Street – “turkeys voting for Christmas” was the conclusion of those within the Westminster bubble.  And it got worse.  In the face of LibDem treachery, the working class protest vote went to UKIP while even more ex-Labour voters stayed at home.  In Scotland, where the SNP offered a social democratic alternative, UKIP went nowhere even as Labour were annihilated.

 “Turkeys voting for Christmas” was once again the Westminster bubble conclusion.  Perhaps this wasn’t turkeys voting for Christmas at all.  Perhaps this was more a case of Westminster bubble insiders putting their hands into the cage in the belief that they were stroking a domesticated kitten, only to discover that they were about to get badly bitten by an extremely irate British lion.  

As protest votes go, this one is a real humdinger!  People who have only ever been able to cast protest votes in the past were asked last Thursday to engage in an existential vote on Britain’s future.  But instead of rationally considering the issues and arriving at a considered conclusion, many (most?) voters appear to have treated the referendum as an opportunity to give a hefty kick to the exposed backside of the global elite.  Yes there was racism, and no doubt unconsciously racist views are held by a large number of us.  But I cannot believe that 52 percent of the people of Britain are racists.  Rather, they were lied to by a bunch of UKIP and Tory chancers who pedalled the lie that all of the ills they were experiencing – the crowded schools and hospitals, zero-hours low-paid work, housing shortages, inadequate policing, punitive social services and insufficient social security – were down to a hoard of EU nationals coming to simultaneously take their jobs and their benefits.

Those racists who voted leave will be disappointed too, of course.  Not even the most swivel-eyed of the UKIPers would seriously propose leaving the European Economic Area (EEA).  To do so would be to devastate what is left of the British economy.  The trouble is that the cost of staying in the EEA is the free movement of capital, goods, services and labour.  Indeed, within hours of the referendum result, leaders of the Leave campaign were claiming that they never promised to cut immigration at all.  By midday on Friday the leaders of the Leave campaign were in essence shouting “ha ha, fooled you”.  No £350 million per day for the NHS; no replacement money for Wales (which delivered an above average percentage in favour Leave); no new money for schools, doctors, housing or a hundred and one other things that Leave promised to the working class in exchange for their votes.

But the damage is done.  And only now is the full enormity of the problem becoming apparent.  The “establishment” is in turmoil.  It will take time to fully understand the steps that the Bank of England has been taking behind the scenes to shore up the Pound – which plunged to its lowest level since 1985 anyway.  What we do know is that it isn’t acting alone.  The US Federal Reserve, the EU Central Bank and international financial bodies like the International Monetary Fund are clearly cooperating to try to prevent the Brexit vote triggering a full blown global crash from which, given the already precarious state of the global economy, we may never fully recover.

The political consequences are enormous too.  Across Europe the crisis is brewing.  Disgruntled citizens and opposition parties are raising the stakes by demanding referendums of their own.  If these are conceded, it will be incredibly difficult to keep the people in the impoverished regions of southern Europe on board.  At the same time, ordinary people in northern Europe who believe they are paying the cost for bailing out countries like Greece, Spain and Ireland may prove no more likely to support what they see as a failing and unaccountable embryonic super-national state.

In Britain, the crisis is already here.  Cameron’s successor will be picking up the political equivalent of a hydrogen bomb.  Whoever that person turns out to be is going to have to engage in the probably impossible task of disentangling Britain’s 45 year relationship with Europe while leading a party with a tiny majority that is split down the middle; and simultaneously maintaining Britain’s anaemic economy… No wonder Boris Johnson looked so despondent when he realised that Leave had won!

The reverberations have already spread across the UK’s political landscape.  Political parties across the UK have already turned inward, splitting both along Leave/Remain lines and away from the centre.  Tory MPs like Anna Soubry have already gone on the offensive against Boris Johnson; accusing him of using a Leave campaign that he never really believed in to further personal ambition at the cost of the British people’s future.  Meanwhile Labour’s Blairite tendency have decided that the best approach to the biggest existential crisis since Dunkirk is to commit ritual suicide by challenging Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership even though the challenge can only succeed if Corbyn agrees to stand down – tens of thousands of ordinary Labour members, still licking their wounds after a fruitless six weeks pounding the pavements and knocking the doors on the streets where most of the Leave voters live, must be distraught at this latest piece of Westminster bubble amateur dramatics.  More practically, the trades unions that fund Labour will need to consider which side or even which party will best represent their members’ interests in the coming negotiations.

Labour MP David Lammy has called on Parliament to simply reject the result of the referendum (someone had to say it).  Technically Parliament – which is sovereign – can do this, since in law a referendum is only advisory”.  But the political consequences could be devastating; effectively putting an end to the pretence of British democracy.  Even less plausibly, LibDem leader Tim Farron apparently promised to stay in the EU in the event of the LibDems winning the next election… to which most British people will have replied; “oh, we didn’t realise you were still here”.  Indeed, along with the Greens and UKIP themselves, the LibDems are likely to have to divide in response to the referendum result, since it is evident that within Britain’s out-dated First Past the Post (FPTP) electoral system, parties can no longer appeal simultaneously to people on both sides of the widening social class chasm revealed last Thursday.  Even UKIP will be obliged to decide whether they are going to turn to false populists like Nuttall and Gill to appeal to the working class, or authoritarian Tories like Farage and Hamilton to appeal to establishment insiders (who provide most of their funding).

Quite understandably, the Scot’s, who voted categorically to remain, and who only voted to stay in the UK two years ago because they were promised this was the only way of remaining in the EU, are now calling for an independence referendum.  In Ireland – the only part of the UK with a land border with the EU – there is a sense of foreboding because that open border was a core part of the peace agreement.  Faced with a split between the largely Unionist pro-leavers and the largely Republican pro-remainers, there is very real concern that this could spiral into the kind of violence last seen in the early 1990s.  In Wales, after continuous rule since the first Welsh assembly election in 1999, Labour managed to produce the largest pro-Leave result in the UK; despite parts of Wales attracting more EU funding than any other region in the UK.  This raises very real questions about whether a Welsh Labour party that has allowed itself to get flabby on the back of the EU gravy train is fit for purpose in a Wales that is about to become dependent upon a right-wing English government for its economic survival.

The Welsh Government is, quite reasonably, demanding a seat next to the Scottish and Northern Irish and UK governments in any negotiations over Britain’s future relationship with the EU.  The Mayor of London might also have to be offered a seat at the table.  This adds additional layers of complexity to a negotiating process that is, in practice, impossible.  Even leaving the negotiations to Westminster will be sufficient to deprive Britain of government in all but name for the best part of a decade.  Just about every civil servant in local, regional and national government will have to be involved to some extent in the minutiae of the negotiations:  “How, exactly will Clause 301(b) ii affect Welsh hill farmers?”  “Doesn’t Clause 223 (a) in the proposed banking treaty with Poland contradict Clause 10 (c) of the Online Monetary Transfer agreement with Spain?” etc, etc. ad nauseum.

Then there is the impact on domestic law.  While in theory, government could (i.e. it has the power to) simply annul all pre-existing EU law; in practice, each change will have to pass through the usual agonisingly slow process of scrutiny in both houses of Parliament; something that can only be achieved – if at all – with the support of all parties or following a fresh mandate in a general election that secures an unlikely much larger majority for the governing party.

While all of this is going on, of course, government will be unable to pass anything other than the most urgent legislation – perhaps no bad thing.  But even emergency legislation may be difficult if it is tied up with pre-existing EU law.  In reality, Britain’s businesses, think-tanks, charities and campaign groups will have to find something else to occupy their time for a generation because government is going to be too busy to listen to them.

It will soon become clear to Leave voters too, that nothing is going to change for the foreseeable future.  Barring a complete economic crash, immigration will continue to rise.  Refugees fleeing the damage done by a thousand British bombs will continue to head in this direction; only now the EU leaders will have less incentive to stand in their way.  Unemployment, underemployment and poorly paid employment will continue to be the norm.  Even if the government maintains benefits at current levels, a falling pound means that prices will rise, effectively cutting the living standards of the poorest people.  Economic growth – barely noticeable prior to the referendum – is likely to disappear for several years as companies relocate to mainland Europe and as ongoing uncertainty deters further inward investment.  This is likely to result in a huge outpouring of anger that could go anywhere.

This has been called the biggest crisis since Suez.  It has even been suggested it could be worse than the crisis that arrived on Britain’s shores in 1940.  I would go further.  I believe that we are embarking on the biggest crisis since Herbert Asquith and Edward Grey almost casually took Britain to war in August 1914 on the promise that “it’ll all be over by Christmas”.  We can only hope that the body count will not be equally high.

This should have been a four horse race

It is now clear that absolutely nothing will have changed on Friday 24 June; irrespective of which way the referendum vote goes.  In law, the referendum is merely advisory – there is no requirement that our sovereign Parliament has to pay any attention to it.  Of course, if there was an overwhelming result for one side or the other, it would be politically difficult to ignore.  But with the polls showing Remain and Leave virtually neck and neck, there is huge scope for political horse trading.

If there is a vote to Leave, it will be so close to 50:50 that our overwhelmingly pro-remain Parliament will find some mechanism to ignore the result – most probably following the example of Ireland, where some frantic renegotiation was followed by a new referendum so that the electorate can vote the correct way.

If there is a vote to stay, nothing changes either.  The result will be so close that the Farages and Johnsons of this world will simply claim they were robbed or that Project Fear unfairly frightened people into voting to Remain.  The leave campaign will no doubt be emboldened in this by the sickening levels of British racism that the referendum has exposed.  As in Scotland following its referendum, far from putting the issue to bed for a generation, it will merely lead to ongoing speculation about the circumstances in which a new referendum will have to be called.  David Cameron – if he is still prime minister – will have achieved none of his aims.  His loony-right back benchers will go on dividing the Tory party and (hopefully) making them unelectable.

The obvious conclusion to draw from this is that the whole exercise from beginning to end has been a complete waste of time, money and energy.  But the deeper reason for this state of affairs is less obvious to most people…  It is the early consensus between the two wings of the British elite that the referendum should ask a simple “in v out” question.  This sounds obvious – keep it simple stupid!  However, it has resulted in considerable anger, division and animosity across the UK that is not going to go away any time soon.  The reason for this is that we have all been obliged to try to shoe-horn ourselves into one of two thoroughly unpleasant right-wing camps.

In fact there are four broad positions in this referendum:

1. Remain because we love the EU just as it is
2. Remain and reform
3. Leave and reform
4. Leave because we love Westminster just as it is.

That queasy sensation that so many of us felt when Tony Blair – hands still stained with the blood of a million Iraqis – was wheeled out to tell us we had to vote to Remain, is precisely because he, Cameron, Goldman Sachs, Jamie Dimon and all the other representatives of corporate power are in the first of these camps.  These are the people that want to remove democracy and introduce market forces into every aspect of our lives.

Most left Remainers, by contrast, are in the second group.  Best articulated by economist and former Greek minister Yanis Varoufakis, this group recognises the urgent need to save the EU from itself by ending its constitutional requirement to pursue the neoliberal free market capitalism that failed so spectacularly in 2008.  These are the people who want to save European capitalism from its own folly.

The Leave and reform (Lexit) group see the stay and reform position as hopeless.  Ordinary people have failed to bring about democratic reform in their own countries.  It will be impossible to build support for treaty change across the 28 countries of the EU.  This group is not – as opponents claim – saying that the current UK government (or one led by Boris Johnson) is fine.  Far from it.  This group also favours reforms such as a more proportional electoral system that will make Britain democratic again.

In this, the Lexit group are very different to the pro-Leave (Brexit) campaign led by UKIP and the Tory right.  The Brexit group clearly want to use the Parliamentary dictatorship that the First Past the Post system produces in order to tear apart the few remaining rights that ordinary people still enjoy. They see the flimsy EU Social Chapter as an impediment to full-blown market capitalism; and would support remain if they thought they could remove it.

While we cannot know for sure, I believe that had we been offered a four-horse referendum, the majority of the votes would go to Remain and reform and Leave and reform.  This being the case, I am also pretty sure that the campaign would have been significantly less divisive.  It would expose our hostility toward the corporations and their paid political henchmen who want to destroy democracy in order to make even more profits.  It would expose the right wing fanatics who blame all of our ills on immigrants.  Instead, it would open up a more urgent debate about how best to build democracy and create a society that works in everyone’s interests.

The failure of the left in this referendum stems largely from our inability to give voice to the similarities between the Leave and reform and the Remain and reform camps.  Both seek democracy and justice.  Both have valid arguments to make.  More importantly, both need to find common ground to mount a longer-term campaign after 24 June.  Failing to do so will merely play into the hands of the racist loony-right.

Instead of shouting ‘Racist’ we really need to use the ‘C’ word again

I think we can all agree that the referendum campaign is deteriorating as we get closer to 23 June. A lack of objective facts; both sides playing on our fears; partisan self-interest; and the absence of anyone prepared to give an honest answer have served to bring out the worst in us.

One side, in particular, is cause for concern.  It is the side that refuses to offer any coherent plan for what its version of the future will look like.  It is the side that insists on banging on and on about just one issue; and will continue to do so right up until 10.00pm on voting day.  It is the side that refuses to engage in a serious debate, and instead sticks its proverbial fingers in its ears and hurls insults around in order to stifle discussion of any of the – many – other issues that might be of interest to anyone who is still undecided.  I refer, of course, to the Remain side.

In case anyone hadn’t noticed, what passes as reasoned debate on the remain side consists of telling everyone else how much they will lose out economically if we leave the EU and, when this fails, to shout the word “RACIST” as loudly and as often as they can in order to curtail any further argument.

Accusing your opponents of racism is, after all, hardly designed to encourage an opponent to expand an argument so that it can be analysed and challenged.  It is, however, something more when it is shouted by the liberal wing of a privileged managerial and professional middle class.  In this context, “racist” has always been a dog whistle for the white working class.  To that section of the middle class that continues to enjoy a position of privilege either directly within the public sector or within one of the many corporations that now suck on the teat of state welfare, the term “racist” or the nastier “chav” is a means of drawing a socio-economic dividing line without having to use the “C” word that three decades of identity politics have made taboo – “CLASS”.

Think for a moment about how mass media symbolise a racist (see image above for reference) – the working class thug with a skinhead haircut, the flag of St George T-shirt, the word “hate” tattooed on his (it is always a he) knuckles.  It is nothing more than a derogatory stereotype of the working class – racism is seldom symbolised, for example, as the CEO of one of the many corporations that routinely and systematically exclude black and Asian people (and women) from employment; particularly at the upper end of the career ladder.  Unconsciously, we have been encouraged to regard being white and working class and being a racist as the same thing.  And it has one extremely pernicious consequence – it allows the privileged minority to shout down the majority.

Four decades of Thatcherism and its bastard New Labour offspring have caused a growing class divide in Britain.  But during those years, we all but stopped talking about class, precisely because a privileged managerial and professional class were doing very nicely out of the deal.  Identity politics became a necessary means of papering over this fact, since superficially, identity cuts across the class divide.  In reality, identity politics is a means of curtailing all discussion of class.  As an illustration of this, in an article of the failure of modern feminism, Eleanor Robertson relates her experience attending a conference session on sexism in the workplace:

“I shifted in my seat, waiting for someone to bring up public daycare, or government-funded parental leave, or the proliferation of underpaid pink-collar jobs, or the economic devaluation of women’s reproductive labour, or any of the issues that have historically been sites of feminist struggle.

“Nobody did, so I raised my hand to mention my sister, who is a part-time childcare worker. How would training women to ask for higher pay help her, as someone who earns a set award wage and has very little power to negotiate anything? How would professional mentoring empower her? How would her life be improved by quotas for women on boards?

“A mildly uncomfortable pause followed. I ploughed on, motivated half by an immediate anxiety about filling the conversational gap and half by raw indignation. Shouldn’t our demands be for universal changes to the structure of society that will help all women, I asked. There was a subdued murmur of assent, and a couple of women voiced agreement. But the matter was soon forgotten, and I spent the rest of the session in a state of tense disappointment.”

Nobody – not even Robertson herself – actually mentions the “C” word.  Nevertheless, the unconscious line in the sand being drawn at the conference was a class division.  There are the salaried managerial and professional women – the kind that can afford the time out to attend conferences on career enhancement – and then there are the wage-earning working class women, like Robertson’s sister who, for a host of practical and financial reasons are unlikely ever to attend such a conference; still less benefit from it.

When Remain supporters shout the word “racist” at the top of their voices, they are drawing the same class dividing line.  The fact of the matter is that the largely pro-remain managerial and professional class have benefited from immigration.  After all, without it we wouldn’t be able to afford all of those trades people who carry out the repairs on our houses; or the hospital workers who keep the cost of the NHS down sufficiently that we do not have to pay more income tax for it; or the various emergency and utility workers who keep our cities running without us incurring huge council tax bills; or even the cheap temporary foreign workers who keep the price of food at Waitrose significantly lower than if we paid a half decent wage to agricultural workers.

Consider the other side of that equation – working people whose living standards have fallen remorselessly since the 1970s; working people who can barely afford the rent on a rundown inner city flat, let alone even think about owning a home of their own;  working people who have been failed by an education system that was deliberately designed to serve managerial and professional privilege (yes, it has been expanded to allow the banks to turn more of our young people into debt serfs; but the graduates from the handful of universities and courses that really matter are today even more likely to be the sons and daughters of privilege); working people who have been on the sharp end of every cut in public services that has been inflicted since the birth of Thatcherism: the crowded classrooms, overstretched GPs, absent dentists, useless social services, inadequate and punitive policing, obstructive social security systems, absence of public spaces, etc.

The working class do not have an “immigrant problem” of course – but it is all too easy to view their concerns through the prism of racism:

“Despite the vocal discussion on immigration during the EU Referendum, animosity is not being expressed towards European immigrants.  It is common to hear people say that there is too much immigration but they “like working with the Polish, they’re alright” or “I would do the same if I was them”.  Typical complaints focus on the difficulty in getting a quick doctors appointment or an over-crowded classroom. People see their workplaces, towns and villages change around them and they were never consulted, asked or involved in any way.”

In my book The Consciousness of Sheep, which is about the profound crisis facing all of Western civilisation – written before we had a Tory government, still less a referendum – I observed that:

“Several factors have combined to undermine people’s livelihoods and to plunge ever more people into poverty.  Government attempts to reverse the deficit and run budget surpluses suck money out of the productive economy.  In such depressed conditions, right-wing anti-immigrant parties can gain traction by selling the narrative that the problem is the result of immigrants unfairly competing for jobs.”

Of course the Vote Leave campaign is going to play the immigrant card as loudly as they possibly can, in exactly the same way as the Remain campaign will continue to play their economic Armageddon card.  That is what political opportunism does.  But the issue that we must address does not concern the referendum itself – we must come to terms with the massive gulf that has opened up across the Western world between the elites and their managerial and professional class running dogs on the one hand, and an increasingly impoverished working class on the other… failing to do so risks pushing them further into the arms of right-wing false populism.

In a pro-Remain column, Polly Toynbee stumbles upon the nub of the issue:

“Try arguing with facts and you get nowhere. Warn these Labour people what a Johnson/Gove government would do and they don’t care. Warn about the loss of workers’ rights and they don’t listen – maybe that’s already irrelevant to millions in crap jobs such as at Uber or Sports Direct.”

People in the managerial and professional class – especially those within the Labour Party – simply assume the British working class are “Labour people” (as if that is stamped somewhere on their birth certificates).  What they cannot entertain – because it threatens their own privilege – is that the British working class had already become an explosive mix of anger and frustration long before the referendum was announced.  Labour can no longer assume that this automatically translated into votes for them.  They need to provide a positive vision:

“For a start labour movement activists have to stop dodging working class objections to low-wage inward migration, or assuming it can all be resolved by an appeal to anti-racism.”

John Harris, who has recently toured the UK getting people’s view on the referendum, is clear that the rift that has opened up in British society is about class not bigotry:

“Hardly anybody talks about the official campaigns, and the most a mention of the respective figureheads of each camp tends to elicit is a dismissive tut – but just about everyone agrees that this is a fantastically important moment, and a litmus test of the national mood…

“In Stoke, Merthyr, Birmingham, Manchester and even rural Shropshire, the same lines recurred: so unchanging that they threatened to turn into cliches, but all the more powerful because of their ubiquity. ‘I’m scared about the future’ … ‘No one listens to us’ … ‘If you haven’t got money, no one cares.’

“And of course, none of it needs much translation. Instead of the comparative security and stability of the postwar settlement and the last act of Britain’s industrial age, what’s the best we can now offer for so many people in so many places? Six-week contracts at the local retail park, lives spent pinballing in and out of the benefits system, and retirements built on thin air?”

Former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan both gets the deeper issue, and unconsciously discloses one of its causes:

“There is an anti-politician mood out there at the moment.  Even retired politicians like me face it.  People are anti-establishment. There is a rampant Them and Us divide.”

This is undoubtedly true.  But notice that seemingly innocuous “out there”.  That, too, is a dog whistle for the class divide.  The “out there” that politicians and pundits talk about is precisely those urban and ex-industrial regions where the working class lives.

It was ever thus, of course.  In the days before Thatcherism, nobody would expect anything other than that the British working class (or at least a large part of it) would be “anti-establishment”.  When working people fought and lost the miners’ strike in 1984/5 they were being anti-establishment, just as they were when they defeated Thatcher on the hated Poll Tax, and when they took on Churchill in the miners’ strikes in 1926 and 1944 (yes we had strikes in the war).  Chartism, the Merthyr Rising, Red Clydeside, the election of Annie Powell  and the National Health Service were all examples of working people being anti-establishment.  But back in those days, the Labour Party both embraced and provided a political focus for that anti-establishment sentiment.

What the referendum campaign has revealed is that Britain’s working class still is an anti-establishment force.  After 35 years of being ignored by the establishment even as their living standards collapsed, a significant proportion of them are prepared to tear down the whole national and European political edifice if that is what it takes to get a hearing.

As Andy Shaw succinctly puts it:

“The commentators and what now passes for ‘left wing’ activists have no relationship with the working class. They are shocked that the EU Referendum has ignited interest, discussion and passion. Their detachment from ordinary people means that they misunderstand their motivation. They genuinely fear the people because, up until now, they have been able to ignore them. If you live in a reified world where the only views you hear are within an echo chamber of reinforcing group-think, it is a shock to realise that most people do not think the way you do.”

The Labour Party in particular must consider its role in abandoning so many of the people it blithely considers to be “Labour people”.  Between 1997 and 2010, Labour presided over a widening class divide that its policies accelerated.  When the inevitable crash in New Labour’s “relaxed about people getting filthy rich” casino economy came, Labour’s true class affiliation was all too clear – they sacrificed the people in order to save their friends in the City.  And while Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have been rewarded with sinecures in the global banking industry, the people have been left to shoulder the burden of austerity.

Whichever way the vote goes on Thursday, the deeper class divide in British society will continue to widen.  In the absence of a positive vision for the future, abandoned by the left, the British working class – like their American and European counterparts – will continue along the path of false populism.  It is an ugly vision of the future.  But if the best we can do is put our fingers in our ears and shout “racist”; it is the future that we are most likely to get.

The Remain campaign must choose Corbyn or choose to leave

In November 1984, fire broke out in the Oxford Circus tube station.  Fortunately, the fire occurred late in the evening; when the station was almost empty.  Fourteen people were injured (only four of them passengers) none seriously.  Inquiries were held, but the core – tragic – message that managers took away was that London Underground’s safety systems worked.  Tragic, of course, because just three years later a similar fire broke out in the busy interchange station at Kings Cross.  Thirty-one people died and 100 suffered serious injuries.  The sad truth was that the safety systems that had been in place at Oxford Circus hadn’t really worked.  Once fire broke out at a busy time of day in a major interchange safety systems failed and people suffered as a result.

In fact, there have been a string of disasters (e.g. the Kegworth air crash, the Herald of Free Enterprise sinking and Hillsborough) where earlier near misses led to complacency when they should have led to some serious soul searching.  This seems to be a fundamental human weakness – and we’ve all done it.  For example, the near misses that we have now and again when we drive most often serve to convince us that we are actually skilful drivers; they rarely prompt anyone to realise just how bad they are; still less to go on a refresher course to improve their driving.

What has this to do with the EU referendum?  Well, rather like London Underground’s managers, the Remain campaign drew the wrong conclusion from an earlier referendum on Scottish independence.  In that referendum, the Remain campaign adopted the negative electioneering strategy that had ejected the hapless Gordon Brown out of office in 2010.  The approach is now colloquially known as “project fear”.  It is a particularly useful strategy for playing a weak hand.  In 2010, the Tories had nothing positive to offer the electorate.  Instead, they highlighted Labour’s weaknesses and the economic risks in electing another Labour government.  In the Scottish referendum, the Remain campaign was even weaker, since the policies of a Tory government in England were hardly likely to appeal to many Scots.

Just like the safety systems at Oxford Circus, project fear seemed to work.  But did it really?  There was blind panic in the week before the Scottish vote after a rogue poll suggested a vote in favour of independence.  Campaign insiders were stymied.  It was only the appearance of the (then) still respected Gordon Brown, promising everything – including the kitchen sink – short of independence itself that saved the day.  Nevertheless, the lesson that was taken away was that project fear had saved the day.

In many ways, the EU referendum is a much harder sell.  There is no positive case to be made simply because it is only the opt-outs negotiated by various UK governments that saved the UK from disaster.  Had the UK been in the Eurozone in 2008 – when our debts were worse than those of Spain, Portugal and Greece – we would have been subjected to real, Greek-style austerity; not the massive borrowing and “public spending-lite” that Osborne has served up since 2010.  Even the most fervent supporters of remaining in the EU concede that there is a lot wrong with it.  Their argument being that it is better to remain and reform than to walk away.  The problem is that they cannot give any voice to the reforms that they intend pursuing if we remain because they are fundamentally divided over the direction the EU should take.  Tory Remainers want to see a reformed EU in which our rights and protections are swept away – no more social chapter, no more environmental protection, no more freedom of movement.  Labour/Green/Liberal/SNP/PC Remainers, in contrast, want an EU in which these rights and regulations are protected and extended.  (Of course, the same divide also afflicts the Leave side, but that is a subject for a different post).

So negative campaigning it has to be.  But here we run into that classic definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and expecting a different outcome.  Gordon Brown’s intervention in the Scottish Referendum was essentially positive.  It offered Scots a beneficial reason for remaining.  It succeeded where a succession of Tory posh boys (who would have struggled to find Govan or Kirkcaldy on a map) prophesying a catastrophe of Biblical proportions had clearly failed. 

The negative project fear campaigning in this referendum appears to be further compounded by a growing people’s revolt against the established order that has largely manifested in the form of right-wing populism in Europe, the UK and the USA.  It is no accident that people have drawn comparisons between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, or between the US Tea Party and UKIP.  These being the (relatively) moderate face of the altogether uglier right-wing nationalist movements that are gaining traction throughout Europe.  In the UK, this was forewarned in 2015 in the uneven distribution of the 4 million UKIP voters; a large proportion of whom were traditional Labour voters in Labour’s urban and former industrial heartlands in England and Wales (in Scotland, where a social democratic SNP offered an alternative direction, UKIP got nowhere even as Labour was annihilated).

At the core of this – largely white working class – eruption of anti-establishment sentiment are, no doubt, a hard core of consciously racist hard core fascists.  But this no more explains the rise of right wing populism than the personality of leaders like Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen or Hofer – people reminiscent of the self-absorbed loud mouth down the pub who trots out simplistic pseudo solutions to complex socio-economic problems.  Instead, we need to look at political systems designed precisely to disenfranchise the majority of ordinary people; together with a debt-based economic system that has served to enrich a minority while impoverishing the majority. 

Those at the bottom of the heap don’t need to be told about falling living standards… Just reflect on the fact that a family with just one partner working in a blue collar job in 1970 could afford to buy a house and raise a family.  Today, the same family would be eking out a living supplemented by meagre tax credits and housing benefits.  The thought of buying a house is a pipe dream; raising a family a remorseless, life-sapping struggle.  I am reminded of the comment of a Welsh steelworker during Thatcher’s recession, when the unemployed were being encouraged to get on their bikes: “They say things are going to get worse before they get better.  Well things can’t get any worse here.  So what’s the point of going there?” Telling unemployed, underemployed and impoverished people that the economy is going to suffer if we leave the EU simply will not do the trick.  If you believe you are already at the bottom of the heap, you might even take a perverse pleasure at the thought that it is those who called you “chav” or “scrounger” who are about to get to taste some of the fare they have been serving to you and your family for decades.

It is not, however, the plight of this group that has fed into right-wing populism; at least, not directly.  The real change is this – the average graduate salary in 2008 was £24,000.  The average graduate salary in 2016 is the same £24,000 (except, of course that inflation – especially in housing costs – means that it is worth a lot less).  In the course of the last eight years, the children of the middle classes have been subjected to the same falling living standards as the working class has been experiencing for several decades.  And, like the working class before them, they have discovered to their horror that the political system doesn’t work for them.  It is their increasingly vocal protest against the system that has legitimised the anti-establishment concerns of the broader working class; and played into simplistic narratives about immigration, sovereignty and uncaring EU bureaucrats.

The first past the post (FPTP) electoral system evolved largely to prevent the majority of ordinary people (once they were permitted to vote) from overthrowing the established order.  Seats have been divided up in such a way that the overwhelming majority of votes do not count.  Out of 650 seats, only 150 or so change hands at most elections.  Worse still, FPTP tends to result in negative voting – with people obliged to vote for the party they dislike least rather than the one they would choose if every vote was equal. The result has been a political class that feels itself insulated from the electorate; a class that is widely seen to rule in the interests of multinational corporate and financial interests to the detriment of ordinary people.

The key factor that generates popularity for the right-wing populists is that they at least acknowledge that there is a problem.  By telling US voters that we need to “make America great again”, Trump tacitly acknowledges the fall from grace that many Americans experience in their daily lives.  By telling them that “America already is great”, Clinton merely alienates them further. When Farage says Britain has a migration problem, he tacitly accepts that a large section of the British people are experiencing a problem (not, as it happens, with migrants; but in reality an infrastructure problem that means that any addition to the population in the poorest districts of our cities results in further pressure on already over-stretched schools, hospitals, transport systems and utilities, while providing nothing in the way of jobs and prosperity).  When the Blairites and their establishment friends wag their superior fingers at the working masses and call them “racist” they simply drive them further into the UKIP camp.  Put simply, Trump and Farage and their ilk are winning because they appear to be listening – “they feel our pain”.

So here’s the problem with project fear – it isn’t listening and it isn’t offering solutions.  All it is promising is more of the same because this is (perhaps) better than the alternative.  There is no vision of a future Europe at ease with itself; in which every citizen is better off…  a Europe capable of overcoming the existential crises of our day (e.g. climate change, the energy transition, and an ongoing banking crisis).  There is not even a Trump-like “making Europe great again”.  There is little more than the vain hope that the Brussels bureaucrats and technocrats will discover some new alchemy to drag the European economy out of the pit of endless bailouts and negative interest rates in which it is currently stuck.  Instead, we find ourselves subjected to the verbal flotsam of the discredited political and corporate figures that a growing part of the population has come to despise.

Anthony Blair, his hands still dripping with the blood of a million Iraqis is wheeled out to tell us that we have to vote to remain or risk conflict in Northern Ireland.  Cameron, the man largely responsible for turning Libya into an ISIL-infested failed state, and who appears to have personally participated in the killing of a British citizen in Syria (before Parliament had authorised action in that country) using a missile fired from a drone, warns us that leaving the EU risks war.  Osborne, a man who many now doubt could pass a GCSE in maths, is wheeled out to tell us down to the last 50p how much our houses will fall in price if we leave (as if lower house prices are going to frighten young people the Remain campaign depends upon).  Jamie Dimon, a man whose name has become synonymous with corruption, malpractice and kleptocracy, is wheeled out to warn us that leaving risks triggering the kind of global finance crash that it is supposed to be his job to generate.  Gordon Brown and Alastair Darling, the men who sold out the British people in order to save the banks (and who have now been rewarded with highly paid sinecures with the banks they sold us out to) are wheeled out to try to pull off the same trick as they did in Scotland.  A procession of global establishment insiders like Carney, Draghi and Le Garde are paraded before us to warn of the economic ruin that awaits us if we are foolish enough to leave.

The problem is not that these establishment figures are wrong.  Only a complete idiot would claim that the UK can simply walk away from the EU without suffering severe economic and social disruption.  The problem is that they are widely perceived to be the embodiment of the very political and corporate elite that so many people are now railing against.  Their project fear is failing not because their basic arguments are wrong, but because the majority of us have our fingers in our ears when they speak.  More worryingly, when they stop speaking, we take our fingers out of our ears, give them the V, and wish a plague on all their houses.

The polls are worrying.  Despite project fear; and despite the line-up of global economic superstars foretelling doom and devastation; the vote is evenly split – Remain are slightly ahead on 45% with Leave on 42% and 13% undecided.  The trouble is that the Remain support includes more than a million younger voters who haven’t registered to vote or are going to be away at Glastonbury on the day of the referendum. They also include a large number of Labour voters who (as in May 2015) may simply stay at home – not least because Corbyn (a man who has been in favour of leaving the EU for decades) currently looks and sounds like a Blairite hostage who has gone Stockholm; making the occasional plea for remain then going back into captivity.  The Leave side, by contrast has much harder support – those who have made their mind up to vote Leave are much more likely to turn out on the day (indeed, many have already sent their postal votes in).  These may also be joined by a large part of the remaining 13% who appear to be wavering between voting to leave and staying at home rather than seriously considering voting to remain.

The core problem for the Remain side is that they are heavily invested in a project fear that everybody thought would triumph because it appeared to work at general elections; in the LibDem’s catastrophic AV referendum; and in the Scottish near miss.  But project fear only works if it can offer at least some semblance of a positive alternative and, crucially, if the person conveying the message has the respect of the voters.  The leading figures of the Remain campaign have neither. As a result, Cameron looks set to lead us to disaster.  He has given us a referendum we would be better off not having, on the back of a negotiation that everyone else believes to have failed, out of sordid self-interest.  This was never intended to be about the British people’s future – it was a squalid attempt to settle an internal row within the Tory party.  Indeed, it is even possible that the promise of a referendum only made it into the 2015 Tory manifesto as a ploy – something to prevent supporters defecting to UKIP; something be negotiated away as part of another coalition deal with the LibDems.  Having blundered their way into this situation, Cameron, and his establishment chums are the very worse people to lead the argument for remaining.

In practice, there is only one person who can guarantee that Britain will stay within the EU at this stage.  But he is the one person nobody in the establishment dare unleash.  I speak, of course, of Jeremy Corbyn; the only political leader in the UK to enjoy a mass supporter base large enough to guarantee a vote to remain.  The Blairites – still less the Dark Lord himself – will deliver nothing less than a vote to leave.  The support of the leaders of an increasingly marginalised trade union movement will not do the trick.  Nor will the ineffectual pleas of charities and NGOs that benefit directly from EU funding rally support for Remain.  Only the mobilisation of that mass of people that swept Corbyn into the Labour leadership can succeed where the establishment figures have failed.

However, neither the Tories, the Blairites nor the wider establishment wants Corbyn anywhere near this campaign for one very simple reason – neither side wants Corbyn to emerge as the man who saved Britain.  Such an outcome would leave Corbyn looking decidedly prime ministerial. Nevertheless, the choice seems clear – project fear can carry on shouting warnings of doom with growing urgency at an electorate that appears to be more inclined to shout “f**k off” in reply; or they can encourage Corbyn to play the Gordon Brown role and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.  The question is whether the posh boys, the Blairites and the wider corporate elite are prepared to risk handing the keys to 10 Downing Street to Corbyn in order to keep Britain in the EU.

Could I sell my right to vote?

Image: Meiling

After more than fifty years, I have come to the conclusion that voting makes very little real difference.  The result of every election that I have ever voted in (and yes, I have voted in every one) has been the election of a neoliberal government that favoured tax cuts for the wealthy, privatisation of public services, authoritarian social policy and economic deregulation.  Throughout those fifty-odd years, I have watched the impact of those policies on the vast majority of ordinary people.

On the day I left school, I walked across the road to a nearby building site and asked for a job.  I started work the following day.  On the wages I was paid for doing that job, I had enough money to save for the deposit on a house, and to buy a motorbike for commuting.  Today, if someone followed the same course, they would be unlikely to earn enough money to rent a bedsit.  They would most probably need tax credits to supplement their income.  I escaped the ravages of Thatcherism by going back to college and earning a first class degree in social science.  That was back in the days when our country believed education was important enough to pay for it.  The year I finished university was the year they introduced student loans.  Had I returned to college today, I could expect to leave with debts of more than £50,000 (tuition fees and living costs) that would have to be paid back (with interest) out of an average graduate salary of £24,000.  Where a single wage earner could afford a family life in the late 1970s, today even a two-salary couple are likely to end up living in a parent’s house.

What has this to do with voting?  Well at every election over that period, the various campaigns were all about how much better off we were going to be if we voted for them, and how much worse off we were going to be if we voted for the other lot.  And the truth is that the majority of us ended up worse off anyway – and worse off by a long way.

Since being better off is clearly central to voting intentions, and since politicians of all parties are singularly incapable of delivering rising living standards, I believe I would be better off if I simply sold my right to vote back to the state.  It would be easy enough to do.  The state could offer students a cancellation of their student debt in exchange for their right to vote.  Older people could have their mortgages and other debts written off through a kind of “people’s quantitative easing”.  Those without debts could be provided with an enhanced tax-free pension that they could take after their 55^th birthday.  This would guarantee that we would really be better off.  This would be cash in hand rather than the empty promissory notes of political parties. And we would all benefit by not being subjected to any more tedious “project fear” election campaigns.

What sort of government could we have?  I propose that we go to something akin to the early Victorian system of government in which the majority of us did not have the right to vote.  The unelected Monarch and House of Lords would have primacy.  If we had to have an elected chamber, it would have a largely advisory role with no real powers either to propose or amend legislation.  I would update the system for modern times, of course.  I would not have a hereditary system.  Rather, I would have government by technocrats – the best educated people from the whole range of disciplines; those best placed to decide what policies are best for, frankly, a population that lacks the education to make the correct decisions for ourselves.  This technocratic commission would have the sole right to propose legislation.  This commission would also elect a president from among its ranks to take the role played by monarchs in days gone by.

I would, of course, safeguard some basic human rights in the constitution of this government.  I would give primacy to the rights of private corporations.  I would establish customs rules so that all corporations enjoyed equal access to the marketplace.  In order to do this, I would need to guarantee some basic workers’ rights (such as free movement, basic healthcare, maximum working times and maternity leave) just to ensure that corporations do not engage in a race to the bottom.  I would also enshrine privatisation and flat-rate taxes as an inalienable operating principle of the marketplace.  It would be impossible to nationalise or subsidise industries or businesses even if these are considered essential.  I would also enshrine austerity policies in the constitution so that, in the event of an economic crisis, the default policy will be cuts in wages, benefits and pensions, and public services for ordinary people; together with tax cuts and generous handouts to the rich.

More perceptive readers will have realised at this point that I am proposing that I should be allowed to sell my right to vote in exchange for accepting the system of government in the European Union as it is currently constituted.  My cynical – I would say realistic – point is that the only way your vote is going to make you better off is if you are allowed to sell it.  It doesn’t matter which way you cast a vote – you will be no better off and will most probably end up worse off.  Believing otherwise is merely the triumph of hope over experience.

The current EU referendum campaign is being run by two wings of the Tory party – Project Fear and Project Xenophobe  - both have sold you the lie that the only question to consider is whether you are going to be better off (hint – you are going to be worse off whichever way you vote).  Both campaigns are peddling bullshit.  You are certainly not going to be better off if you vote to leave, whatever UKIP and the Tory right tell you.  But you are not going to be better off if you vote to stay in either – not least because by having the referendum the UK government has given up the negotiating lever that has kept us out of the most disastrous parts of the EU – Schengen and the Eurozone.  If we vote to stay in, it will be much harder to secure any opt-out on these in future.

Just consider for a moment if the UK had taken the advice of institutions like the IMF and OECD and the World Bank, who are now telling us that we have to stay in this EU, when they told us how much better off we would be from joining the Euro.  In 2008, Britain’s debts were far worse than those of Spain, Portugal or Greece.  But because we still had the Pound, first Labour, and then the Coalition, were able to print money and borrow on world markets to avoid an economic catastrophe.  The people of states like Spain and Greece that gave up their currencies have fared very badly.  They have experienced real, full-blown austerity, not the lukewarm “public spending lite” served up to us by George Osborne.

Much of the pro-EU sentiment has focused on how much better off we are going to be and on how the EU protects us in various ways.  But this sentiment tends to come from people in the managerial/salaried class, who really should get out more.  Before you tell anyone how the EU protects our environment, go breathe the air in central London.  Before you tell anyone about how the EU protects workers’ rights, go look at the £1,200 that a dismissed worker has to pay to bring a case at the Employment Tribunal.  Before you tell anyone that the EU has protected you from the right wing nutjobs who the English persistently elect, just consider that the unelected House of Lords has done more to protect you.  And for those Labour supporters who make this case, just consider what is going to happen if that nice Mr Corbyn gets elected on a mandate to re-nationalise the railways, reverse the stealth privatisation of the NHS, save the steel industry and attempt to undo the flat-rate taxes imposed by various Tory chancellors - all of these policies are illegal in EU law… what stops a democratically elected Tory government (we can have a separate discussion about our corrupt electoral system) will equally prevent a democratically elected Labour government from introducing its policies.  Just in case you think the EU would not overturn the policies of an elected government; go look at what they did to Greece after they voted for an anti-austerity government and voted against austerity in a referendum… they got austerity anyway; just as we will get neoliberalism anyway.

Voting to stay in this EU is to sell your right to vote – you are accepting the rule of a state little different to the early Victorian monarchy.  You are doing so solely on the promise of economists (the people who famously exist solely to make astrologers look good) who claim you will be better off.  For my part I would prefer cash in hand.  Voting to leave this EU means accepting that you are going to be worse off – you are making a sacrifice to safeguard your democracy. 

There is no business as usual in this referendum.  We are neither voting for a Britain governed by the current posh boys, nor an EU as it currently operates.  Just as nobody who voted in the 1975 referendum would recognise today’s EU; nobody voting in this referendum will recognise the EU of 2057 (assuming it still exists).  I have written elsewhere about why I believe a combination of environmental, energy and debt crises pretty much guarantee that we are all going to be worse off financially in future irrespective of how we vote.  So for me, the question is which system is best suited for managing economic decline – a parliamentary democracy or an EU technocracy.

I believe there is a very good pro-democracy Lexit (left exit) case to be made.  I am also pretty sure that if Corbyn wasn't surrounded by a Parliamentary Labour Party that wants to depose him, he would be making the case.  But the whole campaign has been hijacked by bullshit Tory/Blairite nonsense on both sides.  In the end, democracy (for all its faults) is the loser.