On Brexit

by redosiris

We are dealing in weeks now rather than months, and it seems we are no closer to negotiating a viable exit deal from the EU than we were in the days after the cataclysmic result in 2016 which saw the resignation of David Cameron, one more Prime Minister sacrificed on the alter of hubris; go sit on the naughty step with Anthony Eden and Lord North. We are on our third Secretary for Exiting the EU in two years, David Davis and Dominic Raab have gone, the latter disagreeing with a deal he helped to negotiate and the former put in a few hours work in 18 months and showed up to meetings unbriefed and unprepared. Currently Stephen Barclay is the front man for a negotiation which is clearly lead by our hapless Prime Minister, Theresa May.

Parliament is in the midst of its second five-day debate on the deal she has negotiated, the first being pulled half way through as she knew it would fail when the vote eventually came. She promised to go back to Europe to seek concessions and reassurances, not least on the issue that was always going to be the stumbling block, Northern Ireland. Reassurances came there none, so nothing has changed and a further month has been wasted. Fortunately, a vote recently, on which the government was defeated, will force Theresa May to put any “no deal” exit to be put to parliament before it can go ahead; there is a huge majority in the House that will reject any form on No Deal and thankfully Article 50 can be unilaterally extended without the need to involve the other 27 EU states.

However, I don’t want to use this post to review what has and has not been, or even what is perhaps to come, although I have a suggestion. Brexit is something I have struggled with in many ways and I wanted to talk about this personal view to clear my own foggy head on the issue. When the vote came around in 2016 I thought hard about it; I didn’t feel I could be 100% one way or the other, and I doubt many people who ended up voting remain, as I did, were actually in love with the EU. Can you remember anyone at the time, not now, but in 2016 who was extolling how wonderful the EU was? I can’t, but I can name plenty of people who were 100% against it, and that passion has a massive effect on the electorate, even if it was backed up with a pack of lies written on the sides of buses or in the Daily Mail.

I feel you can judge an issue by who is on which side on any debate. I don’t feel I can ever be in a camp that includes Nigel Farage, Iain Duncan Smith and Paul Golding. The only way I may have voted for Brexit in the end was if we had a socialist Labour government at the time, as I felt they could build on the workers rights enshrined within EU law and regulations, that is the hope of the so-called Lexiteers, left wing brexit supporters like George Galloway but it all smelled like pipe dreams on a sewage farm, the Conservatives were and still are in charge and the cases of their senior figures wanting to use Brexit to disenfranchise workers and remove their protections are many and varied. Also, knowing more now about exiting the EU than I did in 2016, a socialist government couldn’t protect us from the market based punishments that a self-defenstration would cause.

When Jeremy Corbyn said he was seven out of 10 on the EU, that chimed with me. No one could argue the EU was a perfect model of transnational governance. The political right hate it due to a mixture of colonialism, patriotism and xenophobia and the left dislike it because it is seen as promoting free markets at the expense of fairness, community and cohesion. No one could come up with any reason to overtly support the EU as it involved maintaining a status quo that people were rightly sick of. We had experienced almost a decade of austerity at the time, people had no money and the whole of our consumer based economy is propped up by a shaky scaffold of personal debt. People witnessed and suffered so many things going against them and at times like that if you offer them a vote, for anything, they will deal you the bloody nose you want to avoid. It wasn’t so much that people wanted to leave the EU but they wanted to “stick it to the man” as the phrase goes.

From there, there has been a growing love of the EU from the centre-ground but they fail to escape the fact that their movement, whether People’s Vote or FBPE on Twitter, it is a movement being promoted most vociferously by people who were happy with how our society was in 2016, it is being lead by discredited and faded politicians who no one has any love for, whether they’re on the left or right like George Osborne, Tony Blair and Nick Clegg. The seeming commonality all these people share is a certain level of wealth; it is no wonder they were happy with things in 2016 as they were doing well, in fact they are still doing well, and so they have no idea what drove a certain constituency of people to vote for disaster two years ago, and what is more they are the least best placed people to try to readjust attitudes now. Every time Alistair Campbell speaks on Brexit he entrenches views, because as much as I could never be on the same side as Nigel Farage, there are people across the political spectrum that could never jump on a bandwagon being driven by Tony Blair’s dossier sexing, war mongering attack dog. As is often the case with a centrist movement they have proven themselves more concerned with what the left are doing, who do not have power, than with the right who do. So both movements have been turned in to an attack on the current left wing Labour leadership. What would be very interesting would be to see if they would prefer a government within the EU lead by Jeremy Corbyn, or a government out of the EU lead by Theresa May; my money would be on the latter.

But I digress. I still prefer remaining. I work in higher education and my sector will be decimated by leaving the EU (I’m not a lecturer, I’m a librarian). There are numerous research collaborations based on EU funding that will be pulled, high-fee paying foreign students will stop coming and our wonderful academic staff, world leaders in their field, will move to other countries where their talents and origins are more welcome. So many industries will be completely screwed by Brexit, and mine is just one; on top of a decade of below inflation payrises. However, without a TARDIS, how do we put a stop to this madness without invoking serious civil conflict? Right wing figures and the feral press have whipped people up in to such a state that any move towards even slowing the process down is seen as treachery; a direct result of Brexit is the rise of the right, and not just the right but outright fascism. Such ideology never went away but it was consigned to the sidelines in the darker corners of Wetherspoons and having a few hundred people have a sad little gathering in some distant municipal town square. Now we have a murdered MP, death threats against other public figures daily and I’ll be amazed if we make it March 29^th or beyond without something else horrific happening that is similar to Jo Cox

What I would like to see is a Brexit that has a route back if it doesn’t work. I realise the EU is unlikely to acquiesce to something like this at first glance but given that there are movements growing for leaving the EU in other European nations it would be a perfect example for populations in those countries to see what happens. Our economy will tank on leaving the EU, one way or the other, that is what all the economic models predict to one level of disaster or another depending on the deal. I think our people need to witness this before they will see the ludicrousness of our position; not the foaming at the mouth racists who shout the loudest about Brexit, but the ones who have believed the lies that everything will be OK; and they are the majority. As soon as their house prices fall, their businesses struggle and their sons or daughters jobs are under threat they will quickly change their minds. It’s rather like the film It’s a Wonderful Life; but instead of seeing what our loved ones lives would be without us, we see what our life would be like without the EU. I don’t think there is a way to avoid some form of Brexit now, but we should move towards it being an inoculation rather than a full dose of the disease. If not, and we exit permanently, then the ensuing economic collapse will again be blamed on the poorest and least able to cope in our society as it was in 2008; but that collapse will look like a walk in the park compared to the potential Brexit has to destroy our country, and more importantly our people.