I’d like to start my first post of 2018 by quoting those well-known Swedish philosophers, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson…
“I work all night, I work all day
To pay the bills I have to pay
Ain’t it sad
And still there never seems to be
A single penny left for me”
Full lyrics here and video here for those of you who want to relive the 1970s (that’s for you Jeremy if you are reading this).
It has long been my belief that the Establishment in the UK only care about money. Since at least 1976, neoliberalism has dominated the economic ‘debate’ in Britain. Governments of all types – Labour, Conservative and Coalition – have bowed down before the demands of the stock markets, selling public assets at a fraction of their value, allowing social housing to be transferred from council ownership to rapacious private landlords and bailing out banks with billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money when, in their arrogance and hubris, they (deliberately?) crashed the world economy. The fact that the entire Establishment – left, right and centre – is doing everything it can to stop the UK leaving the European Union suggests to me that a lot of very rich people stand to lose a lot of money when (and if) the UK leaves the EU.
The ‘left’ in the UK has long stopped worrying about economics. Call me old-fashioned but I think economics is probably the most important aspect of politics. But the ‘leftist’ part of the UK Establishment, represented in particular by the Guardian newspaper and the so-called BBC, long ago abandoned advocating economic reform in favour of the fashionable but fatuous ideology of identity politics. It seems one gets far more kudos these days for worrying about the toileting arrangements of transgender battery hens than from decrying the fact that nurses in full-time employment are being forced to go to foodbanks. I suppose it’s easy to care about the nonsensical claims of ever smaller and more bizarre minorities when one is minted; easy to support the rights of people who claim to be non-binary helicopters when Daddy’s credit card is always there for incidentals like the rent. But even I was taken aback by the latest outburst in today’s Guardian.
A “lawyer and human rights lawyer” called Jonathan Cooper OBE (accepting one of the baubles of the tawdry ‘honour’s system, the true mark of the Establishment) published a rant in the Guardian explicitly linking membership of the EU to protection of the rights of LGBT Britons – Why is no one talking about the Brexit threat to LGBT rights? I know the Guardian is desperate to stay in the EU but this really takes the prize for most ridiculous hyperbole yet. As a lawyer, surely Cooper is aware that the UK has a long tradition of protecting individual rights that stretches back to Magna Carta, even to Anglo-Saxon times? Numerous commenters on the article took the author to task about other non-EU countries that have extensive protections for LGBT citizens. One can also point out that far from being “despised” in Britain, LGBT people have equal rights in terms of marriage and adoption to ‘straight’ people. Would Cooper prefer to live in post-Brexit Britain as a “vulnerable and marginalised” LGBT person or in some of the Eastern European states that are continuing as members of the EU? Or perhaps he would prefer to live in the parts of North Africa or the Middle East where the Religion That Must Never Be Criticised holds sway?
If I still lived in the UK, I would probably have voted to stay in the EU, but very reluctantly – a bit like Jeremy Corbyn who, after a lifetime of Bennite opposition to the EU, bowed to Establishment pressure to support Remain in the 2016 Referendum. The EU has always been about protecting the interests of big business not ordinary people; from its first incarnation as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, it was designed to protect business from competition from outside Europe. Those people who think Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell can pursue their programme of renationalisation whilst remaining members of the neoliberal EU are deluded. Such renationalisation would be illegal under EU unfair competition law.
By all means make the case for remaining as a member of the EU, in a democracy this is your right. The 2016 Referendum did not resolve this issue and the May government’s cackhanded approach to the ‘negotiations’ about exiting the EU must alarm even the most committed of Leavers. If the result had been 52-48 in favour of Remain, I have no doubt that Nigel Farage, the Daily Mail and various other EU-phobes (is this a new word I’ve invented?) would be campaigning hard for a second vote. But absurd claims about the misery that will inevitably befall post-Brexit Britain makes the Remain fanatics look ridiculous.
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