Socialism

The Arrogant Labour Party Pathologises Pro-Brexit Working Class Sentiment

Samuel Hooper17 Comments

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The modern Labour Party, totally unable to relate to its alienated working class base, now seeks to pathologise overwhelming working class support for Brexit rather than question their own blind devotion to the European Union

To truly understand the gulf between the modern, metropolitan Labour Party and its increasingly alienated core working class vote, one need only read the latest column by Owen Jones, in which the “Chavs” author frets that “working class Britons feel Brexity and betrayed”.

Brexity.

Jones’ column in the Guardian doesn’t say that working class people have conducted a rational assessment of their social, material and economic interests and decided that Britain would be better off outside the European Union, in the way that a middle class professional might deliberate and weigh their options. No, when it comes to working class people, they just “feel Brexity”, like babies might feel gassy after feeding, or tetchy while teething – a simplistic emotion or reflex, not a considered thought.

In other words, when a “good” middle-class left-winger (the only kind of person that the Labour Party now much cares about) decides that the EU is simply wonderful, that Brussels is only about “trade and cooperation” and that we should stick around to reform the EU because “Another Europe is Possible!“, they are acting rationally and sensibly. But when working class Britons decide overwhelmingly that the European Union is a bad thing for their interests and kryptonite to our democracy, they must have been wildly misled by nefarious forces (read: Nigel Farage) into voting against their obvious true interests.

Let’s dive in to Owen’s piece:

If Britain crashes out of the European Union in two weeks, it will be off the back of votes cast by discontented working-class people. When Andy Burnham warns that the remain campaign has “been far too much Hampstead and not enough Hull”, he has a point. Even Labour MPs who nervously predict remain will scrape it nationally report their own constituencies will vote for exit. Polling consistently illustrates that the lower down the social ladder you are, the more likely you are to opt for leave. Of those voters YouGov deems middle-class, 52% are voting for remain, and just 32% for leave. Among those classified as working-class, the figures are almost the reverse: 36% for remain, 50% for leave. The people Labour were founded to represent are the most likely to want Britain to abandon the European Union.

A political movement with the smallest shred of humility might look at these numbers and wonder whether maybe the working class voters know, or are attuned, to something which the middle classes are not, rather than automatically assuming that the middle classes are right and the working classes wrong. And a political party capable of introspection might be alarmed to find itself diametrically opposed to “the people Labour were founded to represent” on so fundamental an issue as Britain’s independence and place in the world.

Needless to say, the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Jones (and Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson too) has no such humility and no such capacity for introspection. When confronted with evidence that the metropolitan intelligentsia have gone marching off in a completely different direction to the base, the only instinct is to furiously question how the plebs could possibly  have gotten it wrong, and who led them astray.

Owen Jones continues, becoming even more offensive with every paragraph:

A Conservative prime minister lines up with pillars of Britain’s establishment with a message of doom – and it makes millions of people even more determined to stick their fingers up at it.

The leave campaign knows all this. It is Trumpism in full pomp: powerful vested interests whose policies would only concentrate wealth and power even further in the hands of the few, masquerading as the praetorian guard of an anti-establishment insurgency dripping in anti-immigration sentiment. It is political trickery long honed by Ukip, a party led by a privately educated ex-City broker that claims to be the voice of the little guy against a self-interested powerful clique. If Donald Trump succeeds across the Atlantic, the terrible cost of leaving millions of working-class people feeling both abandoned and slighted will be nightmarishly clear. The same goes for this referendum.

So believing that Britain should leave the dysfunctional and deliberately antidemocratic EU is now apparently a symptom of “Trumpism” – a zesty blend of brashness, proud ignorance and overt prejudice. This is Owen Jones trying to be understanding and win people over, remember. And he does so by comparing them and their sincerely held political beliefs to the egotistical ranting of Donald Trump. Not a great start to the outreach effort there, Owen.

In Owen Jones, here we have a walking, talking mascot for the Labour Party’s refusal to understand why they are not more popular and why the working classes continue to vote for conservative parties and conservative policies. A generation ago, faced with Margaret Thatcher’s three general election victories, the British Left was unable to admit to itself that the Tories won fair and square because people preferred their sales pitch of individualism and opportunity. And this denial continued until late-stage Neil Kinnock and a still youthful Tony Blair finally delivered the harsh dose of reality required to make Labour electorally viable again.

Fast forward to 2016, and a Labour Party beaten back to its fortresses in the city and university campus simply cannot fathom why working class Britons might not like the idea of an increasingly powerful supranational government of Europe seeking to take over more and more competencies from its member states, and ultimately supplant them on the world stage, or why the working classes are stubbornly unwilling to participate in their carefully laid-out left-wing delusion that it is really just about trade and cooperation, honest.

Jones concludes:

It is certainly true that Labour’s coalition is fracturing. The Labour left – which has now assumed the party’s leadership – is in large part a product of London and its political battles from the 1970s onwards. London, of course, has increasingly decoupled from the rest of the country, economically and culturally. As the commentator Stephen Bush puts it, Labour does well “in areas that look like [the] UK of 30 years hence”: in particular, communities that are more diverse and more educated. In many major urban centres Labour thrives: witness the victory of Labour’s Marvin Rees in Bristol’s recent mayoral election. It is in working-class small-town Britain that Labour faces its greatest challenge. And it is these communities that may decide the referendum – as well as Labour’s future.

That’s why Labour’s remain effort needs to bring voices that resonate in northern working-class communities to the fore, such as Jon Trickett, who represents Hemsworth in West Yorkshire. These voices need to spell out the danger of workers’ rights being tossed on to a bonfire; to emphasise the real agenda of the leave leadership; and to argue that we can build a different sort of Europe. It would be foolish for either side to call this referendum. But unless a working-class Britain that feels betrayed by the political elite can be persuaded, then Britain will vote to leave the European Union in less than two weeks.

Well, at least Jones is able to concede that the London-centric leadership of the Labour Party might not be conducive to winning support from outside the middle-class clerisy. This is a start, but the problem will not be truly addressed until the likes of Owen Jones dare to concede that the working classes might have something to teach people like him about values and policy.

At present, even Owen Jones – the media’s standard bearer for defending the working classes – is still at pains to set himself apart from them on the issues. Sure, he will happily empathise with their frustrations, but he will never concede that they might be right on points of policy. He has an elite education, after all, while they work at places like Sports Direct (ew).

Take immigration. In a million years, you will never get Owen Jones to admit that the scale of immigration into Britain over the past decade has been problematic. He will do a better job than almost anyone of saying in that ever so ‘umble tone of his that he sympathises with those who do have concerns about immigration. But then watch him pivot to explain that the real problem is the Evil Tories and their failure to enforce a £10 minimum wage, or build sufficient new schools and hospitals and doctors surgeries to cope with 300,000 net arrivals a year, or to create magically appearing jobs.

In other words, while middle class leftists are allowed to speak for themselves, working class Britons must be “interpreted” by trained interlocutors like Owen Jones. And even when they directly say “I think that there is too much immigration, and it is causing problems”, we should not take it at face value, because really they mean all of these other things, but are not articulate enough to properly express themselves.

And so it is with the EU referendum. Working class people are saying in record numbers that they dislike the EU and want to leave. But the Labour Party, whose true masters and beneficiaries love the EU and are determined for entirely selfish reasons that Britain should remain, is unable to accept that the working classes might be right. And so they wheel out people like Owen Jones, who then tell them exactly what they want to hear – that the party’s working class voters don’t really mean it when they say they want Brexit, that what they really mean is that Britain should stay in the EU to reform it with the help of the Magical Brussels Reform Unicorn.

Don’t mind Kayleigh from Stoke-on-Trent, she’s just feeling a bit Brexity today.

Oh, how a noble political party has fallen. A party that once boasted deep roots in the industrial towns of Britain, and in the trades union movement, has now become a shallow and debased party designed to make London-based creative professionals feel good about themselves while their privileged lifestyles diverge ever more widely from those at the bottom. A party led by the affable-looking Jeremy Corbyn is still very much the party of professional politicos like Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger.

And so it will remain, until Labour – and the British Left in general – learn to stop pathologising those with different political views, particularly those who are supposedly on their own side. Because quite frankly, it is becoming rather grating to hear the self-proclaimed party of equality and opportunity bleat on about how progressive and democratic they are, while percolating in a closed information loop of self-reinforcing metro-left platitudes and furiously ignoring the fact that they increasingly have absolutely nothing in common with those whom their party was founded to represent.

Owen Jones was supposed to be better than this. But none of them are. Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has started making noises about pushing back on the free movement of people issue a bit more, but you can bet that he wouldn’t be doing so if he (and the people he is really fighting for) didn’t have a referendum to win. The fears and concerns, hopes and dreams of working class people are only ever something to be mollified, contained or exploited for electoral gain, certainly not to be used as direct input to the policymaking process.

Right now, with the Parliamentary Labour Party slavishly cheerleading for a European Union loathed by many of its own supporters, the only thing standing in the way of Labour’s complete destruction south of the Scottish border is UKIP’s capacity for self-immolation. If the Remain campaign prevail and win the EU referendum, working class fury at the result (and the way in which the campaign was waged, in which Labour are fully complicit) could see many more defections to UKIP. The only thing likely to prevent this is the chaos which may engulf UKIP when Nigel Farage steps down or is deposed.

With the Labour Party living on borrowed time, one might expect a little humility from its leaders and chief supporters in the media. But these people don’t do humility. They have expensive educations and patiently-acquired groundings in all the right-on progressive values. They earned their right to sit at the top table of the Labour Party and call the shots. And the working classes? They exist to be referred to in speeches and soundbites, or sometimes to be used as a backdrop for media events so long as the event is tightly controlled and they don’t try to speak.

Funny. While the Conservative Party is consumed by a profound crisis of confidence and character within its own leadership, right now it is the Labour Party and British Left – even including poster boy Owen Jones – who most exude the stench of born-to-rule arrogance.

Never let it be said that this EU referendum campaign has not been instructional.

 

Postscript: It’s fair to say that Owen Jones isn’t best pleased with being called out for his condescending attitude towards working class Brexit supporters. He engaged with me on Twitter, taking great umbrage that I had briefly quoted from the headline – though he did not disavow the term “Brexity”

Jones is throwing his toys out of his pram, and has baselessly slandered me in the process – though frankly, being insulted by Owen Jones is a badge of honour which I shall wear with pride. There was no attempt to misrepresent or sensationalise what he wrote. The sub who produced the headline (if indeed it wasn’t Jones) did an excellent job of channelling the overall tone and content of his message – that working class people only support Brexit because they are the dumb victims of “political trickery” – and all of the quotes in this blog post reveal the same rotten attitude towards working class Brexiteers.

It is quite telling that Owen Jones popped up to smear me on Twitter before disappearing without actually defending his tawdry, condescending little piece in the Guardian. He knows that comparing Brexiteers to Donald Trump (as he did) is an unconscionable insult to working class voters, and more evidence of the Labour Party’s growing disconnect from its roots. But more than that, he knows deep down that he is wrong to support the Remain side in the EU referendum. Last year he showed promising signs that he might lead a left-wing awakening and uprising against the undemocratic European Union, but since then Jones – like Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – has fallen dutifully into line praising the EU and furiously pretending to himself that “another Europe is possible”.

This is why Owen Jones is so sensitive and reacted so furiously to being called out on Semi-Partisan Politics. Whether Jones coined the term “Brexity” or not is immaterial – his attitude toward left-wing Brexit supporters, as evidenced by every single word in his Guardian column, is conclusive evidence that he views working class euroscepticism as a pathology, something to be treated, rather than a legitimate political viewpoint to be engaged with (and perhaps adopted as policy).

 

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History Will Judge Left-Wingers Who Betray Their Principles To Support The Anti-democratic European Union

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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Shining an unforgiving light on the wishful thinking and self-deception powering the naive left-wing campaign for Britain to remain in the EU

Your best read of the day comes from Elliot Murphy at Counterpunch, a writer from the Left who systematically deconstructs the fatuous assertion by the likes of Owen Jones, Jeremy Corbyn and Yanis Varoufakis that the EU can be reformed and turned into some kind of Utopian socialist paradise.

Certainly the EU as it is presently constituted is hardly friendly to traditional leftist interests and obsessions, as Murphy points out:

This groundswell of support for Remain across substantial parts of the Left is hard to square with the facts. State aid to declining industries, along with renationalisation, are not permitted by current EU laws (under directive 2012/34/EU), and any mildly progressive government which managed to get elected in 2020 would be hindered from the outset by the EU. Considerable reforms of the energy market would also be illegal under EU directives 2009/72EU and 2009/73/EU. Collective bargaining is becoming much weaker across the EU, most vividly in France and Germany.

McDonnell’s plans for People’s Quantitative Easing? Outlawed by Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The series of anti-trade union laws introduced in Britain over the past few decades? The EU has no qualms with these whatsoever, showing no interest in providing even modest forms of protection for workers.

As the Labour Leave campaign points out, the EU would also outlaw an end to NHS outsourcing, tougher measures on tax avoidance, and general improvements to workers’ rights. The soft Left’s talk of international solidarity and the brotherhood of man in relation to the EU is absurd, especially as it continues to drive forward deeply militaristic and undemocratic (or rather, anti-democratic) policies. The EU is, after all, one the world’s major post-war imperialist projects, boasting an inherently and aggressively exploitative relation with the global South. The entirety of the EU parliament could be filled with McDonnells and Iglesias’s and no substantial reform would be forthcoming: The parliament is an institution purely of amendment and all power lies with the civil servants and the unelectable Commission.

Brilliant. How marvellous it is to hear the fatuous, paper-thin leftist defence of the European Union being properly shredded by somebody who isn’t willing to furiously ignore their own political convictions, suppress the cognitive dissonance and blindly cheerlead for the Remain campaign.

And of course Murphy is quite right – you could pack the European Parliament full of Owen Joneses and Jeremy Corbyns and still it would make no difference to the work and impact of a body which cannot propose or strike down EU laws and policies. There is a reason why the EU’s architects made sure that the one “democratic” component of the entire project was utterly toothless, and this is it.

But what of these nascent leftist “change” movements like Democracy in Europe 25 (DiEM25) or Another Europe is Possible (AEiP)? Murphy has surveyed the work of these and other fantasist left-wing Remainers, and is unimpressed:

When Michael Chessum, a major organiser of the pro-Remain ‘Another Europe is Possible’ (AEiP) movement, is questioned about what concrete ‘changes’ he would like to see in EU, he simply dodges the question. Chessum’s behaviour generalises. To my knowledge, not a single supporter of Remain has presented a satisfying answer to the question of how we are supposed to go about reforming the EU. Even Yanis Varoufakis during his recent ‘Lunch with the Financial Times’ interview confessed that in reality the EU isn’t going to be reformed to anywhere near the extent the Remainers are hoping for (attempts to reform ‘will probably end in failure like all the best intentions’, he claimed). Even Remain supporter Ed Rooksby can write on his blog about how he is ‘not particularly convinced by arguments emanating from [AEiP] in relation to the possibility of transforming EU institutions in a leftist direction’. How is a new, reformed EU possible? How can we change it to break from the Washington Consensus? The answers are, worryingly, not forthcoming.

Quite rightly, Murphy has no time for those who waffle on about reform – “Of course the EU needs reform” being perhaps the most overused phrase of this entire referendum campaign – while failing to outline any concrete or probable steps to achieving that elusive change:

Airy-fairy proposals for ‘another Europe’ to ‘protect our rights’ and so forth simply fill a void lacking any concrete solutions to achieve this and any proposals for how to achieve a new EU constitution. In theory, another anything is possible: Another New Zealand, Another Skelmersdale, Another Isla Nublar, Another Tamriel. It is not as if another EU is inherently unreachable, but rather that without any posited, realistic steps to achieve it, the hopes of the Remain camp will quickly dissolve after June 23rd, no matter which side wins.

Concrete solutions are lacking, then, as it is no good for the Left camp of Remain to simply point voters in the direction of Owen Jones columns and Caroline Lucas YouTube videos instead. The powers of the European Commission, European Central Bank and European Court of Justice are guaranteed by EU treaties and can only be reformed as a result of a unanimous agreement within the Council of Ministers. AEiP may exert some moderate degree of influence over the UK’s soft Left, but it will have to become substantially more commanding if it hopes to influence the Council of Ministers. Likewise, the foundational pro-austerity, market liberalisation principles of the EU are established by the same treaties, which can be modified only by a unanimous agreement by all 28 member states.

Quite so. All of this, one must recall, is taking place in the context of David Cameron having singularly failed to extract even one substantive concession from his fellow EU heads of government during his damp squib “renegotiation” effort.

Now, this blog will be the first to concede that the entire exercise was a sham – the government didn’t even bother to properly consult the people as to the nature of reform which we wanted, arrogantly assuming that they already knew. But in any case, even when faced with the potential departure of the European Union’s restive second-largest contributor, the EU offered nothing by way of sweeteners. Would it have been different had Angela Merkel et al been dealing with a genuinely eurosceptic British prime minister? Perhaps. But if David Cameron couldn’t get any kind of deal from the EU, what chance do a fuzzy coalition of leftists have of achieving reform in another direction?

Neither does Murphy have time for the weak reasoning of foreign leftists who have sought to parachute themselves into the debate with a minimal understanding of the facts:

The Left Remain camp have also recently been galvanised by Noam Chomsky’s tenuous support for their cause, with Owen Jones and AEiP posting quotations of the professor’s brief statements on the matter. Chomsky’s reasons for supporting Remain are extremely weak and don’t stand up to much scrutiny. His reasoning is as follows: The racist Right is in favour of Leave, therefore we should Remain. But the racist Right is also in favour of Remain. Chomsky’s logic seems to be as follows: If P, therefore Q, so why not Z? Indeed, if an Out vote would simply ‘leave Britain more subordinate to US power’, as Chomsky claims, then why did Obama urgently, even desperately call for Britain to Remain? Owen Jones has in the past ridiculed what he calls ‘Chomsky fans’ on Twitter (while also labeling those who politely disagree with him ‘Stalinist’, ‘sectarian’, ‘ultra-left’ and ‘Gallowayite’), but deems it appropriate to sign up to his views when they align with his own. Chomsky’s opinions about the UK are naturally not going to be thoroughly well-formed and articulated, unlike his criticisms of US domestic and foreign policy: For instance, during a visit to the University of St Andrews in 2012 he expressed pro-monarchy feels for the rudimentary reason that if people enjoy it and find it fun, then who’s to object to it?

Many on the left simply cannot begin to address the limitations of the Remain camp: For instance, Media Lens, UK leftists sympathetic to Chomsky, have been oddly silent about the entire EU referendum. A certain level of unease and awkwardness pervades a lot of discussion about the EU, with many preferring simply to abstain or delay decision making until later. At Chomsky’s university, Matt Damon recently addressed MIT’s class of 2016 with ideas that Will Hunting would be far from impressed with, calling for a Remain vote with his typical mixture of casual arrogance and self-assurance, but devoid of any argument or apparent understanding. Damon ultimately retreated into the safe territory of banker-bashing, forgetting to justify his reasoning for supporting Remain.

So Matt Damon thinks that Brexit is a bad idea. Who the hell cares? Damon clearly has no understanding of the history or political issues at stake, and is merely parroting what he believes to be the “correct”, right-on opinions in order to signal his own virtue. More worrying is the fact that when it comes to the specific question of the EU, many thinking leftists are doing the same thing – temporarily switching off their brains and switching themselves over to “mindless repetition of approved talking points” mode.

As this blog conjectured when Owen Jones abandoned his nascent euroscepticism and went back to loyally cheerleading for the EU:

It is a shame to see Owen Jones – at his best an intelligent and articulate voice on the Left – frittering away his time on the EU referendum campaign by pointing out the foibles and tactical hypocrisies of the Leave campaign. But what other choice does he have? Despite knowing full well that the EU is unreformable, Jones has committed to supporting Britain’s continued membership.

I think that this is a betrayal of the democratic accountability and local control that Jones spends much of his time promoting. And I suspect that he does, too. Which is why we can all expect to see lots more “gotcha” videos on YouTube criticising individual members of the Leave campaign, but not a damn thing praising the European Union or explaining how this magical socialist “reform” of the EU is to be achieved.

After all, nothing distracts from a guilty conscience like pointing out the flaws, failings and inconsistencies of other people.

The behaviour of the British Left during the EU referendum campaign would probably make quite an interesting psychological study as an exercise in mass delusion. Thousand of not millions of people with solid left-wing beliefs and a rightful distrust of the establishment are now simultaneously trying to convince themselves that voting for the establishment and the status quo is somehow the brave, left wing thing to do.

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This coping mechanism takes its toll, which is why left-wing Remainers are so much happier when they are criticising the behaviour of the Leave campaign (making their slanderous allegations of racism and so on) – the more they talk about the wretchedness of the Evil Tories, the less time they have to consider their own betrayal of left-wing principles.

And just look at what it is the supposedly compassionate, generous and open hearted Left are endorsing by campaigning for a Remain vote:

One of the major disasters of the Remain endorsement by substantial parts of the Left is that many seem incapable of acknowledging that the EU has by now become masterful at generating racism and promoting finance capitalism. Acknowledging this dynamic is frankly essential in understanding the rise of Far-Right forces across Europe. The EU was more than willing to impose sanctions on Greece when it became tempted to disobey orders to kowtow to European banks, but it seems far less willing to do anything about the rise of the Far-Right in Germany, France, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary. As Kevin Ovenden recently put it in Counterfire: ‘Far from countering the far right and authoritarian tendencies, the EU – with its austerity, Fortress Europe, anti-democratic diktats and endemic national antagonisms – is generating those reactionary features: and not only on the far right. The EU is fully behind the French government of Francois Hollande. It has suspended basic freedoms under an eight-month old state of emergency and is using the militarised police to batter through new austerity measures passed not by parliament, but by executive decree’.

[..] The ‘choice’ of austerity in Britain is no such thing in the EU, being part of its treaty. Anyone who claims that the EU is beneficial to workers’ right clearly hasn’t read the text of its treaty, which makes it very clear what the EU’s intentions are, and always have been. The ‘freedom’ for big firms to move capital, labour and commodities without any restrictions in order to maximise profits, regardless of social or environmental cost, is something no genuine socialist, communist or anarchist could ever support. Moreover, the EU is infamously driven towards privatisation, ‘free markets’ and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (largely the work of the Troika) – which signifies game over for much of Britain’s indigenous industries if adopted, as the EU’s 28 states engage in a race to the bottom in order to diminish living standards and workers’ rights.

Hardly the kind of behaviour that a good comrade should be defending, surely?

Oh wait, this explains it:

In the face of this apparently austere ideology, the EU is nevertheless careful to generously fund British quangos, charities, arts groups, museums and universities to ensure the recycling of a healthy pro-EU sentiment amongst the influential middle class intelligentsia, academia and commentariat, ensuring that most of its major limitations are sidelined or forgotten about. It manages to do all this after having intentionally destroyed Britain’s fishing industry. This system amounts to one of the clearest definitions of a racket.

But it is more than a racket, isn’t it? It is almost what you might call class warfare – the privileged and well connected upper middle classes aggressively asserting their interests (continued funding for their quangos and charities) over the interests of the working classes. Again, Murphy is absolutely right to call out the hypocrisy.

Murphy is also right to ask how the Left will be viewed if Britain does vote to Leave, in a future where smoothly exiting from political union while maintaining access to the single market ensured that none of the Remainers’ apocalyptic warnings of economic ruin come true:

A serious Left argument against the EU needs to be presented both in the event of a Leave or Remain vote, since without the presence of any serious Lexit arguments being presented, in the event of a Leave vote left-wing Remainers will be thoroughly cornered and will be forced to rapidly re-orient their tactics to accommodate for the likely UKIP gains (among many other things). When Remainers focus purely on the positives of the (often dubious) positives of EU, we should ask how this dishonest and skewed set of priorities will be interpreted post-referendum.

Absolutely so.

When the dust settles, and when Britain continues its slide away from democracy in the event of a Remain vote, all that people will remember is the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Jones – people who pride themselves on their right-on credentials – standing shoulder to shoulder with the establishment in defence of the status quo. And when they tremulously offer their “battered spouse” excuse (but I thought we could change the EU!) they will rightly be scorned, and mocked and then ignored.

Already UKIP is starting to encroach on Labour’s heartland vote. Labour MPs and former ministers are lashing out in confusion and outrage at the unwillingness of local councillors and ordinary party activists to help them in their great establishment effort to keep Britain in the EU. On this issue, the parliamentary party and the grassroots are starting to come apart at the seams. And in the event of a Remain vote, you can be sure that UKIP will be there, ready to pick up swathes more disaffected Labour votes.

The question of Britain’s independence is not a partisan issue. It is equally as shameful when conservatives are willing to sell out their own democracy as when socialists do the same. But given the nature of the EU, and how this corrupt supranational political union benefits the wealthy and well connected elites far more than the people, it is Labour’s dogged support for Remain that stinks to high heaven.

Tony Benn would be ashamed of what his party has become. Labour are supposed to be the party of ordinary people. We know because they never shut up about it. And yet nearly the entire Labour Party is uncritically cheering the status quo and our ongoing membership of a dysfunctional political union which nobody would invent if it didn’t exist, and nobody would join if it did.

But of course, there were always two sides to the Labour Party – the cerebral middle class ideologues and internationalists, and the working class movement borne out of the trades union movement. Well, we know what happened to that particular branch of Labour in the age of the SpAdocracy. Now all that’s left is the middle class clerisy.

Now, the middle class left-wing clerisy want desperately to stay in the European Union – it funds their research, universities, development schemes, artistic projects and businesses, funnelling them British taxpayer money without the unseemly need to beg the taxpayers directly in elections.

They love the EU because it enables them to virtue-signal their enlightened progressivism, while also delivering a whole host of lucrative in-house side benefits. And if it means betraying democracy, betraying the poor and betraying the interests of Labour’s core voters, that’s just fine. So long as that grant money keeps flowing, of course.

Sadly for these parasitic folks and their defenders on the pro-EU left, some of us are watching, observing and taking note. And when the time for blame and judgement comes around, there will be no escaping accountability for having sided against democracy in their arrogance, fear, ignorance and greed.

We will make sure of it.

 

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Maurice Glasman Makes A Thoughtful Left Wing Case For Brexit

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Maurice Glasman’s thoughtful intervention in the EU referendum debate is more proof that left-wing thinkers who value democracy naturally gravitate toward Brexit

The glib, feeble left-wing case for Britain remaining in the European Union can basically be summed up as “don’t give us back democracy, because the British people might be so foolish as to demand conservative policies and vote for conservative politicians”. It is, in other words, profoundly and actively anti-democratic, springing from a toxic and elitist mindset which hates and distrusts the people.

Unsurprisingly, the great and the good of the modern Labour Party have therefore flocked to its banner, endlessly repeating the shocking (to them) warning that if Britain did not have certain values imposed from above by a higher authority in the form of the EU, the British people themselves might not be so enlightened as to choose left-wing policies for themselves.

This is a weak and contemptible argument, and those advocating it – from Jeremy Corbyn to Owen Jones to Yanis Varoufakis – should know better, and quite probably do know better, deep down. This makes their betrayal of British democracy all the more unforgivable.

But there is a left-wing case for Brexit of more substance and nuance, and Maurice (Lord) Glasman now makes it in LabourList. At its core is still the desire to favour left-wing politics in particular rather than seek to regain democracy in the abstract, but at least Glasman puts some actual thought into his argument.

Glasman concedes that the EU was flawed from the start:

Unfortunately, probably from the outset, and certainly by the Rome Treaty of 1957 a Jacobin tradition of unmediated space, emptied of decentralised institutions had asserted itself, particularly through the head of the High Authority, that became the European Commission, Jean Monet.  He asserted that economic exchange and legal uniformity would, over time, produce political unification.

Perhaps naturally, Glasman traces the EU’s decline firmly back to the accession of Britain in 1973:

Under the leadership of Edward Heath, who had a genuine feeling for the fate of Europe, Britain did join the Common Market, as it was called it for a long time.  It did not go well from that time on as the Common Market was not based on a shared political economy. 

Britain is an island and was always at an angle to Europe.  It avoided the continental territorial struggle for domination and developed a maritime rather than a landed economy as well as distinctive political institutions based upon the balance of powers within the Ancient Constitution. 

De Gaulle, in continuation with Napoleon, thought that all Britain cared about was free trade and the primacy of the City of London. He argued that the British State could never agree with either the administrative directives favoured by the French or the institutional co-operation embodied in the German Social Market. 

The difference between territorial rule underpinned by an army and central directives and a maritime economy based on the Navy and free trade was what was at stake in the Napoleonic wars.   In boycotting Britain and building a Europe of administrative conformity Napoleon continually blasted Russian, German and Austrian leaders for continuing to trade with Britain, which as a maritime power traded with the world.  Napoleon’s career ended when he voluntarily boarded a Royal Navy ship and was taken to a faraway island where his board and lodging was paid for by the City of London.  Despite the conclusive result of that conflict it was not the end of the argument. 

The political and economic systems of Britain and France was very significantly different.  Britain had dispensed with its peasantry during the last stages of enclosure and the Corn Laws, it had embraced the market at home as well as free trade abroad. On joining the Common Market the very unhappy marriage of Napoleonic directives and free trade objectives began which threatened the European Community’s earlier achievements of agricultural protection and worker participation.  The Common Market, or European Economic Community as it then became known, had been built on a substantive conception of an economy based upon agriculture and industry, land and labour.  Britain, in contrast, brought a model of a financial and services based economy in which free movement rather than social partnership was the primary goal of political union. 

And correctly identifies the anti-democratic black hole which appears when the EU technocracy instinctively recoils from the people and their dangerous passions:

As the European Union becomes more general, abstract and administrative it will naturally side with capital and directives, viewing politics itself as populist.  The reaction is already present within each European State. When I was in Berlin last weekend the AfD had surpassed the SPD in the polls.  When reason itself becomes desiccated and exclusively rational, severing itself from institutional judgement and historical experience it turns all forms of resistance into demagogy and madness.  And yet, democracy is the European way of resisting the outrageous claims of capitalism to own, commodify and de-contextualise human beings, nature and all civic institutions.  The tension between democracy and markets can no longer be resolved at the level of the EU, which through its inverted definition of subsidiarity in which the larger subsumes the smaller, is hostile to democracy, distinctive local and national institutions.

Obviously Glasman is particularly interested in democracy as a means for the people to resist what he sees as the “neo-liberal” agenda of the EU – he is not advocating Brexit for the pure sake of democracy. But at least democracy gets a look-in in Glasman’s argument, which is more than can be said of the Jeremy Corbyn / Owen Jones position, which unashamedly seeks to cling on to the European Union precisely as a means of suppressing British democracy.

Glasman’s conclusion is particularly devastating (my emphasis in bold):

For many years the European project has served as an alternative to Labour having a serious politics of national transformation, of building the coalitions necessary to constrain capital and strengthen democracy. It was a national political weakness that led to the enthusiastic embrace of the EU and it remains a refuge from domestic political defeat.  Labour should be robust in supporting free and democratic trade unions throughout Europe, in championing a balance of interests in corporate governance and strong civic self-government with a deep partnership between universities, cities and firms.  The question is whether being part of the EU hinders this.  Britain is already outside the Eurozone and the Schengen agreement.   It is gratuitous to remain part of a political union that is so hostile to diversity and democracy and so disposed to the consolidation of big capital that it has become a remorseless machine for the liberalisation of trade and the disintegration of society, in which the demand for liquidity has dissolved solidarity. Perhaps it is time to think again.

This really gets to the heart of it – the EU has indeed been an poor alternative to having a serious national political conversation about how we wish to govern ourselves. Labour are not exclusively to blame in this regard. Politicians from all parties have gladly surrendered power to the European Union, eagerly seizing the opportunity to keep the trappings of power for themselves while divesting themselves of ever more responsibility for the outcomes of decisions now made in Brussels.

And how refreshing it is to hear a personality from within the Labour Party actually suggest that maybe – just maybe – it should be the job of left wingers to argue their case in public and seek to convince the British electorate of the attractiveness of socialist policies rather than seek to bypass the electorate and impose social democracy from above via the EU.

In fact, Maurice Glasman, founder of Blue Labour, is exactly the type of voice that the Labour Party needs to listen to and place front and centre of their policymaking if they want to staunch the exodus of working class support from a party which increasingly resembles a middle class, creative industry, virtue-signalling talking shop.

A party which lost seats to the Tories because of traditional voters defecting to UKIP – and facing the prospect of Nigel Farage’s party nipping at its heels in a swathe of Northern constituencies – would make a place of honour for someone like Maurice Glasman, and perhaps even listen to what he has to say about the European Union.

But they can’t do it. Jeremy Corbyn and co. were happy to enrage the party establishment and donors on all manner of issues, from the Syria military action vote to their perceived tolerance of anti-Semitism. But on the crucial issue of Britain’s membership of the European Union, suddenly Stockholm syndrome kicks in and everybody robotically sings from the same worshipful hymn sheet. It’s pathetic.

There is still an element within the Labour Party that actually cares about the hopes, dreams, fears and priorities of the working class. But you won’t find it within Jeremy Corbyn’s inner circle, or the mainstream party in exile. This dwindling branch of the Labour Party is now much like the Popular Front in Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” – a solitary man, sitting on his own, ignored by everybody else.

In their unthinking support for the European Union, the shining practitioners of the New Politics have thrown the working class – indeed , everyone who loves democracy – well and truly under the bus. And at some point there will probably be a reckoning for that.

 

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Warning Of ‘Tory Brexit’, Labour’s Unspeakable Shadow Chancellor Parades His Contempt For Democracy

Samuel Hooper10 Comments

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The Labour Party doubles down on its sick, openly anti-democratic case for Britain remaining in the European Union

That slobbering, Marxist, assassination-approving, lynching-advocating IRA-supporter John McDonnell continues to show his contempt for democracy by loudly opposing Brexit on the grounds that freedom from the European Union might make it easier for a democratically elected British government to actually, y’know, govern.

Of course this would be terrible and cannot possibly be allowed to happen – when the incumbent government is a Tory one, that is.

Labour’s unspeakable shadow chancellor is now taking to the pages of the New Statesman to promote his pie-in-the-sky, fantasy land “Another Europe”, whereby an explicitly integrationist and federalist club can be magically transformed by McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn, Yanis Varoufakis and other assorted left-wingers into some kind of Utopian, socialist paradise.

McDonnell, trialling his “Tory Brexit” catchphrase again, writes:

The undeniable truth about the referendum is that what is on offer is a Tory Brexit. On 24 June, we will still have a Tory government, because under the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act the Conservatives could change leader from David Cameron to Boris Johnson and still try to cling on until 2020.

This would be a disgraceful betrayal of democracy. But what over the past six years has suggested to you that anything would be beneath the Tories? And, regardless of who would be leader of their party, the initial trade negotiations following a Tory Brexit could resemble TTIP on steroids.

We know what they think of the Working Time Directive; can you imagine what other workplace rights they would trade away and try to blame on someone else? With global economic uncertainties combined with George Osborne’s economic incompetence, the UK is uniquely exposed to the risk of an immediate economic fallout from a Tory Brexit.

Odd, you might think, that Labour’s shadow chancellor is so happy to associate the movement to restore democracy and independence to Britain with his lifelong enemies in the Conservative Party. But then these are not ordinary times.

McDonnell continues:

I want to see a reformed EU in which we make many of its institutions more transparent and democratic. For the first time in a generation, there is a growing coalition of socialists across the EU who can help us achieve this together. By choosing Labour’s “Another Europe” agenda, our country can stand with others across Europe to make a positive case to end austerity, offer a more humane response to the migrant crisis and protect and expand workplace rights.

And the evidence that this Magical Candyland Europe spoken of so warmly by leftists from Jeremy Corbyn to Owen Jones is actually achievable? Zip. Zilch. Nada. Tumbleweeds. The very purpose of the European Union is to facilitate a process of integration towards a common European state. Don’t take my word for it – see what the EU’s own leading voices openly say about their creation. In this grand endeavour, democracy is the mortal enemy. And John McDonnell seriously thinks that he can make EU institutions deliberately designed to shut out popular opinion more democratic?

Whether or not there is indeed a growing coalition of socialists, there is absolutely nothing to suggest that they currently form – or could conceivably form in the future – a bloc powerful enough to wrest control of the key European Union institutions. Even if the parties of the far-left somehow manage to defeat the parties of the centre, centre-right and far right and become a force in the European Parliament (itself an impossibly tall order), so what? The European Parliament is a rubber stamp, the least important and least powerful of all the EU institutions. How does that alter the makeup or direction of the Commission or the ECJ? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t.

The very best scenario that McDonnell and friends could conceivably hope for is to jam the European Parliament with a bunch more angry leftists. But any anti-establishment wave which helps the left is generally likely to help the right, too. In fact, the radical right have been running rings around the socialists for some time. McDonnell’s dream scenario, therefore, is one where parties like Podemos and Syriza scream at parties like UKIP and others much further to the right, and bring the European Parliament to a cacophonous deadlock, while the other EU institutions – the ones which actually matter – glide on, unchecked.

Here is a political party – and an approximation of a man – who have let their blind, seething, inchoate rage against the Evil Tories snuff out what little dedication they ever had to democracy or respect for the will of the people. Here is a shadow chancellor and broader left-wing movement who are so wedded to their policy of unthinking, virtue-signalling pseudo-internationalism that they would sooner doom Britain to remain trapped in an antidemocratic, dysfunctional, failing political union than admit the terminal flaws in the European Union and fight for left-wing policies in a newly independent Britain.

But more than all of that, this is a left wing movement which cares about democracy only when it advances their own particular narrow agenda. John McDonnell isn’t willing to energetically make the case for the things he claims are under threat in case of Brexit. He simply wants those things to be undemocratically imposed on the British people by a higher, supranational authority. He wants to win without trying, to impose his beliefs on others without doing the hard work of winning them over. McDonnell literally doesn’t care how his policies are implemented, or who is steamrollered in the process – just as long as those clapped-out old left-wing policies somehow see the light of day.

You can call that “passionate” and “principled” if you want, if you are still enthralled by the Corbynite glow. But the rest of us should call it what it is – narrow minded, bigoted authoritarianism.

Meet your friendly Labour Party of 2016 – happy to throw democracy and British independence under the bus in pursuit of the fevered hallucination of a united, socialist Europe.

 

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The Moral And Intellectual Cowardice Of The Pro-EU Left

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

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The modern Left loves the EU because having lost the public argument for socialist policies, they see in Brussels their last and best hope of imposing their left-wing ideology on an unwilling population

Tom Slater has an excellent piece in Spiked, in which he takes to task all of the big name lefties – some of whom previously toyed with supporting Brexit as they watched the EU’s antidemocratic behaviour with growing horror – who are now supporting the Remain campaign, and thus betraying democracy when it truly matters.

Slater writes:

The last few prominent Eurosceptics on the left have started to peel away. They’ve been confronted with a once-in-a-generation opportunity to smash power, to strike out for democracy and to put the future of European politics firmly in the hands of the people, rather than a faceless, byzantine bureaucracy. And they’ve bottled it.

First there’s Yanis Varoufakis, the flash stepdad of European leftism and the former finance minister of ailing Greece. This is a man who has experienced the tyranny of the Brussels set firsthand. His modest proposals for rescuing debt-laden Greece from EU-enforced austerity were ignored. ‘Elections’, he was told by German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, ‘change nothing’. He quit government in protest as his Syriza comrade Alexis Tsipras signed an agreement that would once again shackle Greece to Troika diktat. What is the self-styled ‘erratic Marxist’ up to now? He’s touring the UK, telling Brits to say ‘Oxi’ to Brexit so that we can ‘reform the EU from within’.

Then there’s Owen Jones, the Corbyn choir boy who has followed the Labour leader’s transformation from Bennite Eurosceptic to apologetic Remainer. Last summer Jones called for the left to campaign for Brexit. After the horrors of Greece, he wrote, it’s time to ‘reclaim the Eurosceptic cause’. Now, just 10 months on, he’s joining Varoufakis on the campaign trail. His flirtation with principle over, he wants to ‘unite with people across the continent to build a democratic, workers’ Europe’. How propping up a democracy-thwarting institution puts you in line with the little guy is beyond me. Not least when said institution has effectively abolished workers’ rights in austerity-battered countries like Greece.

But perhaps the most glaring retreat of them all has come from Paul Mason. The former Channel 4 economics editor and ‘radical social democrat’ actually had the brass to pen an article titled ‘The left-wing case for Brexit (one day)’. One day. Those two, trembly words sum up the sentiment of these fair-weather Eurosceptics. Yes, yes, democracy – one day. Not now. Especially when, as Mason sees it, a Brexit would allow Michael Gove and Boris Johnson to ‘turn Britain into a neoliberal fantasy island’. He’s in favour of democracy, you see, just not when the pesky demos elects a government he doesn’t like. This is hypocrisy dressed up as strategic nous.

Tom Slater is absolutely correct to denounce each and every one of these reversals as a shameful failure of courage. His piece is entitled “The Progressives Afraid Of Change”, and regrettably that is exactly what we see from the supposedly ideologically pure Corbynite Left. Yet after having grown in prominence and power primarily by denouncing the compromises and betrayals of the centre-left, these virtue-signalling true believers are now selling out British democracy in exactly the same way, proving that they are no better than the Blairite New Labour government which they so despise.

This blog has also taken each of the prominent leftists identified by Tom Slater to task for their utter failure of courage and vision. My critiques of Owen Jones are here, here, here and here, Yanis Varoufakis here and Paul Mason here.

Slater continues:

In fact, it’s worse than that. It’s often said that the shift in left-wing attitudes towards the EU over the past few decades has been the result of pure political contingency. When, in the 1970s and 80s, the EU was seen as an avowedly capitalist project, Labourites and trade unionists took arms against it. Now that it’s been given a social-democratic lick of paint, replete with talk of workers’ rights and free movement, it gets the nod. But there’s something even more sickening going on here. These turncoat Remainers, these radicals for the status quo, don’t just bristle at the turn of public opinion, on economics or migration – they’re scared of it. Their Brexit-phobia is really a fear of the demos itself.

You see this in their panic-stricken talk of the furies Brexit might unleash. ‘We don’t know… how the plebeian end of the Leave campaign will react if they lose. My instinct says: badly’, writes Mason. Varoufakis, meanwhile, is even more pessimistic. Only fascists and racists, he says, will profit from the demise of the EU. A Brexit now would mean ‘anti-migrant racism, pandered to by the political establishment for decades’, writes a commentator in the New Statesman. There is constant talk of chaos. Democracy is seen not only as disagreeable, but as dangerous. The left, once intent on stirring the passions of the people, now wants to keep a lid on them at all costs.

This is why you shouldn’t take the left appeals to ‘reforming the EU from within’ seriously. Not only because Cameron’s paltry renegotiation revealed an EU incapable of making even minor concessions. Not only because the only salient proposal Varoufakis’s Democracy In Europe Movement has managed to come up with is livestreaming council meetings. But because the cowardice of the left in the face of Brexit is bred of the very same fear of an unshackled demos that forged the European Union in the first place.

Devastating, and utterly correct. For the European Union itself was deliberately designed to muffle and constraint the voices of national electorates, replacing them with the cool, cerebral and detached government of a supranational European elite, which is exactly what the pro-EU Left now want – a tool to suppress what they see as the “dangerous” authentic voices of the people.

Slater concludes:

The modern left’s detachment from the masses, its sneering distaste for our habits and desires, has fostered a profound fear of change itself. Their paranoia about where unleashed public passions might flow has led them to cling to the status quo for dear life. These are progressives terrified of change – and terrified of us. Faced with the opportunity to demolish an anti-democratic order, they are standing athwart, yelling Stop. History will not be kind to them.

But it is worse than a mere lack of vision and fear of change. Most offensive of all is the grubby desire of the pro-EU left to bypass democracy altogether, to give up on trying to persuade national electorates of the value of left wing policies and simply impose them from the EU’s unaccountable, supranational higher level of government.

As this blog recently put it:

The Left look around and see free markets accepted and delivering prosperity in nearly every country, including those who have sworn eternal opposition to capitalism. And despite the Corbynite takeover of the Labour Party in Britain, there is still no evidence of a groundswell of public longing for 1970s style statist economic policies to be brought out of mothballs. What chance, then, does the Left have to bring more of the economy under state control other than the extreme long shot of seizing control of Europe’s supranational layer of government on the back of the supposed European left-wing popular movement (DiEM25) talked up by Varoufakis and Jones?

As Varoufakis admits, “the retreat to the nation state is never going to benefit the Left”. The Left can only advance their cause by sidestepping nation states altogether, which means taking control of the EU, where national legislatures are bypassed and unpopular and even hated policies can be imposed on the peoples of Europe with very limited opportunity for effective resistance (see Greece). This may seem laughably unrealistic – and it is. But it is the Left’s only remaining hope, and so they cling stubbornly to their delusion even if it means betraying democracy and supporting the EU in its current form (and with its current policies) until the time comes for their popular revolution.

And that, to my mind at least, is the most disappointing thing of all. Even pugnacious, articulate left-wingers like Owen Jones and Paul Mason are unwilling to achieve their desired ends by first winning the public debate and then winning a national election. Their commitment to democracy is so feeble that they would rather see their preferred policies foisted on an unwilling British people from above by the European Union rather than do the hard work of winning support for those policies among the British electorate.

Of course, they don’t explain it this way themselves. Talk to Owen Jones and Paul Mason and you’ll get an earful about their deep concern for workers’ rights or some other emotive issue. But when push comes to shove, they would rather live in a country where their minority opinions were forced on the majority by Brussels than do the hard work of convincing voters of the necessity for left-wing policies.

And the Left are perfectly entitled to that opinion. They are entitled to advocate for Britain to remain in the European Union because they do not trust the British electorate to support what they see as essential policies at the ballot box. They can do all that. But they cannot any longer call themselves supporters of democracy.

 

Postscript: Look at the image at the top of this article, showing a quote by filmmaker Ken Loach, in which he openly boasts that the chief advantage of the European Union is that it thwarts the will of democratically elected national governments. This is the toxic, antidemocratic position which left wing favourites like Owen Jones and Paul Mason have decided to embrace. Shame on them.

 

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