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.