No, me neither

Unlike the very distinguished professor who said to me 'it's never crossed my mind that there could be a Leave vote. Do you really think there might be?', at least I have the freezing cold comfort of being right this time. I learned my lesson during the last election, the result of which confirmed that neither I nor anyone I know is of or understands the bulk of the British electorate. I have students of most political shades and we do occasionally speak of these things but on the whole they're firm supporters of the Weather Party: politics is like the weather in that it's uncontrollable and happens to them whether they like it or not. So I don't get much of an insight into the general public that way.

I'm also enmeshed in a web of political fantasies: I hang out with Communists, Irish and Welsh nationalists of the nice variety, trades union activists, historians and philosophers. The Britain I carry around in my head has two sides. There's the nuclear-armed Imperialist murderer/American lickspittle with all its freight of fears and prejudices, fuelled by the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Express, resenting human rights, foreigners, benefit scroungers and sniffing out paedos on every corner. Then there's the Britain of Paine, Wollstonecraft, William Morris and Walter Crane, Tolpuddle, William Price, Rowan Williams, Robert Owen and the Co-operators, the Lancashire mill-workers who starved rather than handle slave-produced American cotton, Edith Sitwell, Ivor Cutler, the International Brigadiers, the Commonwealth (despite the Irish unpleasantness), the Levellers, the Chartists, Suffragists, Peter Tatchell, George Formby, John Peel, satire, Cable Street, The Miners' Next Step, Kinder Scout, cricket, the Clarion Clubs, Cymdeithas yr Iaith Cymraeg, Speakers' Corner the Left Book Club, the Guardian, the Kindertransport, Clement Atlee and the NHS, CND, The Field Mice, hunt saboteurs and the Ramblers' Association, trades unions and queuing politely and apologising to people who've walked into you. Basically the side of Britain that doesn't see Abroad as somewhere to be invaded, feared or patronised.

Today it's hard to see that second Britain, the eccentric, open-hearted, generous, funny, radical and welcoming group of nations. I always assumed that its spirit lived on, that the people of the South Wales valleys for instance would remember the hundreds of thousands who marched for their jobs and volunteered to die in Spain for democracy, or the Welsh who struck and wrote and lobbied and committed acts of civil disobedience for their language, their homes and for peace. I was wrong. I cannot see the Tolpuddle Martyrs in Dorset's vote to leave the EU, nor does the spirit of the Pankhursts live on in a country which has decisively decided that it doesn't want any human rights, thank you very much.

What do we have to look forward to? In my immediate surroundings, the loss of European colleagues and students, of access to that sophisticated network of thinkers, ideas and resources, let alone funding. Environmental protection will go, as will employment protection: it's all just 'red tape' after all. Our food will be further adulterated, the air will go foul, the poor and the black will find no refuge and our former colleagues in the EU will have no sympathy at all for this self-inflicted wound.

There's a tiny bit of me that thinks Britain had it coming: never having adjusted to being a second-rate power after losing its imperial possessions, it never tried acting in the collective interest, never tried to play a constructive role, couldn't act as anything other than a wrecking ball in the EU. What surprises me is that the other countries didn't have a referendum on throwing out the UK. Perhaps this is a good opportunity for Britain to learn a little humility, and with the loss of Scotland, perhaps the tiger will be tamed, having lost its embarrassing job as America's sergeant-major. However, these unworthy thoughts won't help the people of Britain, particularly those Out voters who will be the first to suffer when EU development grants and subsidies are withdrawn from the Valleys and the Northern English ex-industrial heartlands.

How did we get here? It's tempting to suggest that the Brexiteers are prejudiced Know-Nothings, but I'm a utopian socialist: I believe that the majority of the people have the capacity for greatness given the right conditions. I don't blame Nigel Farage and his little band of red-faced blazered petit-bourgeois golf-course revanchists. They're a symptom rather than a cause. The cause is the complete abandonment of political vision and trust by the British left. The right has always had two faces: backwards-looking social conservatism of the kind espoused by grassroots UKIPpers, and hardline free market neoliberalism. They've always been completely honest about what they want from the electorate. The conservatives want a society in which everyone knows their place and weirdos (women, foreigners, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, trades unionists) basically anyone who wouldn't be welcome to dinner with David Archer) do what they're told. The neoliberals don't care what colour, sex or gender you are as long you also don't interfere with the distribution of money from the poor to the rich through the financialisation of the economy.

So that's the Right: completely honest. Then there's the left. It had a good 1940s: the war demonstrated that collective effort could bring about good things: defeat of the Nazis, the NHS, widespread nationalisation of industries that had failed in the private sector. It occasionally spasmed back to life: Wilson's Open University, for instance. But on the whole, the Left utterly failed to develop any vision of the post-industrial society that the Right was busy making real. The Right occasionally made gestures in the direction of social conservatism, but it was essentially happy to trade mass employment and high wages for increased shareholder value. That's how we got a Chancellor who said that high unemployment was a 'small price to pay' for low inflation, a Labour Prime Minister proud that Britain had the worst worker protection in Europe, and a legislature made up of landlords and tax-evaders passing laws to make the UK a tax haven.

What did the Left do? Did it (like William Morris) imagine a bright future based on socialist values and kindness to all? It did not. The hard left deluded itself into thinking a revolution was just around the corner, the soft left imagined conspiracies around every corner and the Third Way Blairites and Clintonites gave up entirely and aimed to do nothing more noble than soften the edges while having no critique at all of neoliberalism and the new imperialism. Convinced that the working classes were all paranoid racists, they acted on those assumptions, until we got to the point of Labour – once the protector of the poor and huddled masses – selling mugs promoting crackdowns on immigrants.

How were the people so fooled? The neoliberals were quite happy to misdirect blame from capitalism to immigrants/Europe/whoever while they got on with seizing our water, phones, railways, health service and anything else not nailed down. The Old Right genuinely believed it, and the press – from the screeching Mail to the apparently balanced BBC – either promoted these discourses or allowed them to go unchallenged. Just look at the way welfare benefits and refugees were replaced by benefits cheats and illegal immigrants, scroungers, benefits tourists and the rest.

What I and my friends on the left entirely failed to do was set out both the scale of the economic problem and optimistic, realistic solutions. Labour got used to treating the working class as an embarrassing, lumpen bunch that would do what it was told, but that it avoided meeting as much as possible (not true, of course, of many dedicated individuals) rather than as a source of strength, ideas and inspiration. Such assumptions have a habit of coming true. Into the void came the peddlers of poison: the Tories who should know better and the UKIPpers and assorted fascists who probably don't. They promoted easy solutions and obvious causes and Britain fell for them. It's a commonplace in religious studies that the decline in organised religion doesn't lead directly to atheism: it leads to the mushrooming of 'alternative' spirituality, from Prosperity Churches to crystal healing. I think it's the same in politics: if you deprive people of agency, if you treat them with contempt, they will abandon you and they will listen to those peddling simple, relatable lies.

Before I voted, I asked myself some simple questions. Would my students be more free out of the EU? Could the same be said of my friends who work in call centres and Amazon warehouses? Would my friends under the care of the NHS get faster, better treatment? The answer to all these things was 'no'. Britain hasn't voted from freedom, it has voted for corporate sovereignty, governed by a group of people who see their job as delivering the people to the corporations.

There's a lovely country out there, full of wonderful people. I and my friends simply forgot that it needed water and sun and weeding to keep it alive. While we neglected the garden, the slugs and weeds quietly got on with their job.

Be nice to someone today. It's all we have left.*

*Well, I also have an Irish passport. It might come in handy.

Yes, but no, but yes but no but…

I hope everyone else is as confused by Britain's 'negotiations' with Europe as I am. Cameron seems to exacted a series of pledges from the rest of the EU that are either meaningless or minuscule. The effect seems to be calculated solely to appease the headbangers on his own backbenchers whom he personally riled-up during the days of the coalition by promising them a referendum solely for tactical advantage. Having promised it, he then had to generate some heat to justify it, and so along comes this list of supposedly earth-shaking agreements that actually look a bit embarrassing. Some fiddling with child benefit that doesn't cost much and doesn't apply to many; an exemption from one of the vaguest clauses ever to be committed to parchment 'ever-closer union'; a temporary brake on in-work benefits in unspecified circumstances to solve a non-existent problem and – perhaps the sole thing Cameron actually cares about – some perks for his donors in the financial sector (who show their gratitude by, er, not paying any taxes). Then of course we have the utterly grotesque sight of a backbench MP and Mayor of London being invited to Downing Street for 'talks' as though he were a visiting head of state rather than a rival in the Conservative Party's power struggle. Call that democracy?

If I was a European leader I would be seriously pissed off about being recruited to play a part in a political stunt that's of no interest to most British citizens and of no international merit. Europe is falling apart under the contradictory pressures of the Syrian crisis, the environment is degrading in front of our eyes, Russia is annexing chunks of our neighbours' countries, corporations are poisoning our children, selling our data and evading their taxes and yet the British have hijacked the political agenda to ensure that sugary tea and gristly sausages get protected AOC status (while, I would like to point out, lobbying to weaken car emissions laws in the wake of the VW scandal).

The British have never been anything other than wreckers within the EU as de Gaulle knew. What baffles me most of all about the whole thing is why the rest of Europe puts up with it.



Somehow the UK wants to be America's lapdog and Europe's top dog with very little justification for why it deserves it. Wielding rented nukes is no excuse. Yes, the UK has a very large economy – apparently not large enough to fund public libraries – but an awful lot of it is either shady money or dependent on access to EU markets.

Like most people, I'm fairly conflicted by the EU debates. For the British hard left, of which I am often aligned, the EU is a capitalist plot designed to weaken the working conditions of the masses and ensure the continued hegemony of unaccountable financial elites, though the continental socialist movement doesn't feel the same way. However, I have long felt that while it is a capitalist plot, the alternative is a much nastier capitalist plot with added viciousness. Even the rightwing Western European governments are herbivorous compared with the vicious asset-stripping the UK labours under. What little workers' rights British citizens have are guaranteed by the EU and the various (but not related) European courts. The same applies to human rights (don't forget that the Conservative Party wants to abolish them), reproductive and sexual minority rights, environmental protections, consumer protections and so much more. Leaving the EU would result in a hostage situation. Between the wing of the Conservative Party that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the finance sector (look up tax-avoiding Treasury minister Andrea Leadsom's funding for example) and the wing that sees the poor, sick, Welsh, Scots, young and professional classes as the enemy and you'll soon discover that the EU's mild capitalism is a damn sight more welcoming than British government which will sell us to the lowest bidder just so long as they can carry on fox-hunting.

I look at the Tories and UKIP and see several strands of contradictory thought. They believe in the free movement of capital above all else, but detest the free movement of people. They hate regulation of banks, emissions and everything else, yet they hark back to some imaginary golden age. They hate superstates which are unelected and distant, yet adore the British parliamentary system which features 900 unelected Lords and 650 elected MPs (about to be reduced to 600). They love the British Empire at the same time as hating the EU superstate. They say that the Eurozone is undemocratic and economically unwieldy, applying the same fiscal rules to diverse conditions, while condemning the Welsh and Scottish nationalists for criticising Westminster's identical behaviour. I have a dystopic vision of a non-EU largely derived from Julian Barnes's England, England, in which the Isle of Wight becomes a theme park based on a fantasy bucolic past, while an independent England becomes a backwater ruled by narrow-minded authoritarians. Coincidentally enough, I found the Grassroots Out campaign's decision to design club ties before doing any actual campaigning hugely rich in sociological data.

It's redolent of the kind of golf-club fascism that lurks under the surface of these reactionaries, scared of women, immigrants, ethnic minorities, northerners, the Celtic nations, the poor etc. etc. And just think how many more of them there will be when Spain sends back those hundreds of thousands of Daily Mail readers who just wanted a sunnier, whiter Britain and moved to the Costas without ever learning a word of Spanish or gaining any wider perspective. I wonder if the UK political classes' blinkers mean that they assume everyone wants to come here and no True Brit will lose out by not being able to go Over There. After all as we well know, Abroad is Ghastly and They All Think In English Really, They're Just Being Difficult.

In the end, I'm sorry to say, I would take a Brussels government over any British government of whichever party. I remember all too clearly Labour's Tony Blair going round boasting that the UK had the harshest trades union laws in Europe. I don't like or understand Britain's sense of exceptionalism. Yes, its Empire was one of the largest but there's nothing it did that anyone should be proud of, nor does it justify special treatment. If part of the EU's purpose was to bind nations like Germany so closely to its neighbours that it will never misbehave again, Britain certainly deserves the same treatment. Rather than kow-towing to these braying toffs and small-minded UKIP bigots, our friends should keep Britain bound and gagged in a back room until it's ready to behave like a global citizen and good neighbour rather than the local bully.

In an ideal world, I'd vote for a EUSSR in a heartbeat: a radically democratic and socialist continental nation which afforded responsible government to a hugely diverse population with due regard for the rights of minorities everywhere, while combining to provide justice, peace, security and environmental protection in all those cases where collective action alone can make the difference. In the real world, too, membership even of this decaying structure is a positive benefit: just look at South Yorkshire, or the Welsh valleys, or the ex-industrial belt in Scotland. All these and more places have been thrown lifelines not by an indifferent and even hostile British government. I genuinely believe that Britain out of the EU will be a meaner, crueller and poorer place. But at least it might occasion the break-up of the UK and render it harmless for the ages.

So in the end, my answer to the EU referendum is vote Yes, but not with any joy. The negotiations were a political charade and it feels awful to reward this kind of cynical shenanigans with a positive outcome but the alternative is just so much worse. Imagine Farage, Grayling and Johnson's faces grinning at you from every TV screen as they joyfully announce the closure of the last women's refuge or adolescent sexual health scheme, as they sell the last old folks' home to Goldman Sachs (unelected distantly-run and unaccountable corporations are totally different from 'Brussels') and finally as they oversee the loading of the last cattle trucks to Dover bearing the last foreign care workers, while Jeremy Clarkson revs his engine ready to take them off to the the unveiling of a statue to Margaret Thatcher at Rhodes (formerly Oxford) University (chancellor: Michael Gove).

As I said, my feelings are confused and emotional, a bundle of crude political assessment, atavistic fears and ideological prejudices. But I do tend to think that in an uncertain world, building bridges with largely good neighbours is a damn sight more constructive than arrogant one-upmanship.

Democracy, but only for your enemies

I'm watching the British media coverage of the Hong Kong democracy protests with some fascination. I'm supportive of the protesters: China is in no way a socialist or communist state, merely an autocracy or kleptocracy which has retained the branding of communism. Any decent communist should be fervently wishing for a complete collapse of the now satirically-titled 'People's Republic'.

So that's the cause dealt with: three cheers for Occupy Central and its allies. But cursed with a little historical knowledge, I view the UK's political and media support for Occupy with a jaundiced eye. The British took Hong Kong by force in 1841 in reprisal for the Chinese forcing British drug dealers to destroy their stock (opium, in this case). They then negotiated additions to the territory at various points, with a lease that expired in 1997.

So that's 156 years without a single election for the premier, and elections to vague and useless 'advisory councils' only started in 1984, after the return of HK to Chinese rule was negotiated. It's hard not to see this late and tokenistic democratic gesture as little more than a satirical gesture designed to establish some tiny distinction between the 'free' West and 'tyrannical' China. For 156 years, decisions about Hong Kong were made 6000 miles away in London and executed by a man dressed like this:

I think this extends to the UK media coverage of Hong Kong's protests. I haven't seen a single word about the colony's political history: the silent implication is that denying HK democracy is typical Chinese or Communist behaviour. The British like to pose as democrats to the fingertips, but they've always preferred to drop it on their enemies rather than extend it to their subjects or (in postcolonial times) business partners. Yes, Saudi Arabia, I'm looking at you. When Tony Blair announced that Britain had to invade Iraq for 'democracy', I congratulated my New Labour MP and asked when the invasion of Saudi Arabia would begin. His reply was a rather huffy 'that's different'. Of course it is: Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a vile dictatorship of terror, while Saudia Arabia is a vile terroristic dictatorship which buys a lot more weapons, beheads a lot more people and makes women's lives a living hell.

I guess I'm still a political adolescent, caring about principle over realpolitik. But back to Hong Kong: let's all support the protestors not because we enjoy annoying China but because democracy is a good thing per se, while examining our own national consciences a little more closely. I can't help thinking that if the democracy protests had occurred under British rule, we'd have had a lot of furrowed-brow commentators interviewing bank CEOs worried about 'stability' and the economy, just as we have with the Scottish independence referendum.



Here, for example, is a staged ambush performed for the Pathé cameras by the British Army in Ireland, 1920 (sorry I can't embed it) and here's another in which those debonair Black and Tans keep proper British order in a devastated Ireland wrecked by rebels. Meanwhile the same arguments against Scottish Independence were being raised against Irish Home Rule in the Irish Times:

…today’s Irish Times… claimed that the cold reality of the mistake that was Home Rome was now beginning to dawn on nationalists as they looked at the detail of what was proposed.
The paper said that ‘fantastic assurances can no longer deceive intelligent nationalists. They are beginning to realize the hideous barrenness of the Promised Land.’ The paper concluded: ‘They begin to perceive that the Bill for which they have sacrificed so much spells national bankruptcy for Ireland - increased taxation, the starvation of all schemes of material improvement and social reform.'
'The Irish Parliament must find the money for all these things, and will be powerless to find it.’

There's always a framework within which the media operate - you just have to look for it. So don't expect support for the HK democracy movement to last beyond what's politically expedient. States and parties don't work like that - but we can.

One step closer to statehood

It's referendum result day in Wales: the vote was to give the Welsh Assembly law-making powers similar to the Scots Assembly. I have no idea why Wales didn't get them from the start other than Anglocentric discrimination, and it's about time.

Live TV coverage of the results here or an English-language webpage here: final tally at 1300.