A Second Referendum Is Not The Issue, Opposition To Brexit Is

At a glacial pace, Labour's leadership is edging towards calling for another referendum. As the Euro elections showed, its too little, much too late. But, the real point is that backing another referendum is not the real issue, opposing Brexit is. If the Labour leadership does change its position to backing a second referendum, the first question, as would be the case in the event of a General Election, is what line would Corbyn and the Labour leadership take in it? Would they back Remain, Leave, an impossible Labour Brexit option, Remain and Reform, in which case, what kind of reforms etc. The second question is, if the referendum came down in favour of a No Deal Brexit, what then? Would Labour, and all those that have been calling for another referendum, put themselves in the invidious position of having to support that outcome and carrying it out? What happened to the idea that socialists first concern should be to stand on their principles, to argue for them, and continue to fight for them, whether they win a majority for them or not? What happened to the idea that the first responsibility of socialists is to tell the truth to the workers, no matter how unpalatable, and that their principles should be based on what is objectively in the interests of the working-class. 

Suppose there were a party that was doing well mobilising support for the idea that women's place is in the home, looking after the kids, the sick and the elderly, rather than taking away the jobs of married men, who needed the money to support their families, and that women, prepared to work for pin money, undermined men's wages. It may seem a ridiculous proposition today, but that kind of idea was rampant amongst working-class communities in the 1960's, and even into the 1970's. Its the corollary of the idea that the reason British workers wages are low, is because “foreigners” are taking those jobs, and are prepared to work for peanuts. The false argument is the same, only the scapegoat chosen is different. Moreover, on the back of the kind of reactionary agenda that the Brexiters have promoted, their fellow travellers in Europe, and elsewhere, have already moved on to that logical next step. People like Orban in Hungary, are already promoting this kind of Kinder, Küche, Kirche agenda. 

Would the Labour Party then decide to triangulate towards this section of voters that was attracted to these reactionary ideas? I wish I could say the answer is obviously not, but on the basis of what has been seen over Brexit, and the willingness, not just of the Labour Leadership and right-wing Labour MP's, but also of whole swathes of what is supposed to constitute “The Left” to abandon principle, in search of cheap populism, and votes, I have no great confidence that that would be the case. It would not be the first time the Left has capitulated to reaction in response to a populist upsurge. 

Listening to Tony Blair on Sky News, this morning, I have to say that his analysis of Brexit is absolutely right. His conclusion that Labour must come off the fence and adopt a clear position is also quite right. His further conclusion that that should be to argue for another referendum, is completely wrong, for the reasons set out above. There is no reason for calling another referendum unless you are absolutely clear what position you are going to be fighting for in that referendum, and so far Labour's Leadership has no such clarity. But, also there is no point arguing for a referendum, unless you are absolutely committed to implementing its outcome. There is absolutely no principled basis for Labour to implement a referendum decision in favour of Brexit, any more than it should implement a referendum decision to force women back into the home, precisely because it is reactionary, and against the interests of the working-class. 

Blair is quite right that there are only two real alternatives – No Deal Brexit, or No Brexit. A soft Brexit, based on being in the Customs Union and Single Market, is theoretically possible, but practically impossible. The Tories are not going to pursue it, as they head towards electing a No Deal Brexit leader. Labour would need to win an election to pursue it, but their Utopian idea of have cake and eat it, by being outside the EU, but having all the benefits of being inside, is not going to happen. They could settle for vassal state conditions, whereby they accept all the rules, but have no part in making them, but who would go along with that for long, and what would be the benefit? 

But, Blair is also right that the truth is, as I said at the weekend, and have said for the last few years, that no Prime Minister will actually implement a crash out No Deal Brexit. It would be disastrous for Britain, leading to chaos, of a scale that would lead to demands for an emergency re-admittance on whatever terms could be achieved; and long before it even got to that stage, the Pound and the financial markets would crash, interest rates would soar, and the government would be forced to capitulate. The most a Tory Prime Minister could do, would be to push for a “Managed No Deal” Brexit with the aim of moving towards a Canada style free trade agreement in a few year's time, but there is no guarantee the EU would facilitate that, and it has a series of other problems attached to it. The only real option is to revoke Article 50. That is what Labour should argue for vociferously, rather than messing around with demands for another referendum that might, in any case, commit it to a course of action that socialists should be completely hostile to supporting. 

The problem with the 2016 referendum was this. For years there had been nationalist parties advocating British withdrawal from the EU, and the EEC before it. None of those parties managed to get any MP's elected. Indeed, they all got less than derisory votes in General Elections. The reason was that the question of the EU was not a major concern for the vast majority of the electorate. Some grumbled, and soaked up all the nonsense about the EU demanding that bananas be straightened, just as they soaked up all the nonsense about immigrants and other “benefit scroungers” being given free luxury houses, cars, not needing to pass their driving test and so on, pumped out by the gutter press alongside other such ridiculous stories such as “Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster”. Some of them who swallowed this garbage were even Labour voters, who voted that way out of tribal loyalty, and others because things like Labour's commitment to the NHS and so on, compared to the Tories, far outweighed their grumbles about the EU, scroungers, and immigrants. The truth is though, they were always only a minority of Labour voters. 

Those like Lisa Nandy, Caroline Flint, Gareth Snell, John Mann, Ruth Smeeth and so on, who want to go after these minority of Labour voters, in a strange coalition with sections of the far left that push this notion of a mythical mass of “left behind” Labour voters, by appeasing bigotry, are on a fool's errand. The Labour voters who held and hold these bigoted views, are a minority, even in those areas that voted heavily in favour of Leave. Even in those areas, they constitute at most around 35-40% of Labour voters, and going after them means losing a large chunk of the 75% majority of Labour voters, who now see they can vote Liberal or Green in England, and SNP or Plaid as well in Scotland and Wales. 

But Andrew Adonis, also speaking on Sky News this morning was also right, as against John McTernan, in arguing that the answer for the Lisa Nandys is that what will win those seats for Labour is not appeasing the bigotry, but telling the truth to the workers there about Brexit, and how it will actually damage their interests, alongside promoting Labour's clear and more radical economic and social policies. Indeed, it makes no sense to try to argue for the latter, whilst the national debate continues to be dominated by Brexit, and it makes no sense to talk about Labour's more radical economic and social agenda, whilst equivocating over Brexit, because if Brexit happens, Labour's radical economic and social agenda becomes impossible to pursue. The task then will be to simply try to deal with the weakened position that workers will find themselves in, as jobs disappear fast, and a victorious and rampant Tory hard right begins to implement its policies of Libertarian Minarchism, and red in tooth and claw free market competition. 

Thatcher was only a halfhearted supporter of Hayek and Von Mises, compared to the ideologically devoted libertarians and contrarians such as Farage, Claire Fox (Foster), Rees-Mogg et al. If people in Wigan thought they were badly done by as a result of Thatcher's Austrian School, and libertarian policies of the 1980's that inflicted deindustrialisation and devastation on them, they have seen nothing compared to what her modern day equivalents in Farage's Brexit company, and the Tory Right have planned for them! 

Blair is also wrong to think that the Tories would be mad to call a General Election. Having got shut of May, the Tories are now on course to elect a Brextremist Prime Minister. All of those Tory voters that gave them a kicking by voting for Farage's Brexit company, will come flooding back to a hard Brexit Tory Party led by Bojo, Raab, Gove, or Baker. At a stroke, the Tories would steal Farage's main asset, a clear message that the Tory vote can mobilise around, and, at least in Bojo, a charismatic leader, able to rouse the mob. On its own, its not enough to win them a General Election. May tried to push the hard Brexit line in 2017, and failed miserably. But, in 2017, it was possible to rally the enthusiasm behind the Corbyn surge on the hope that Labour would provide opposition to Brexit. No more. If Labour continues to equivocate, even in the slightest, and fails to come out to openly commit to scrapping Brexit, it will continue to lose votes to others who do offer that prospect. There is no real choice between a Tory hard Brexit, and a Labour impossible Brexit. They are both Brexit, and those for whom the issue has now become an acid test, and whose views on the matter have become entrenched will not vote for a Labour lesser evil Brexit, as against a Tory hard Brexit. 

Farage and his Brexit company are demanding a seat at the Brexit negotiating table. They should be given one. Indeed, the ideal situation in 2016 would have been that having proposed Leave and undertaken the Leave campaign, Bojo and the other Leavers should have been invited to form a government, on the basis that “You broke it, you bought it.” Theresa May, in a way, went part of the way. She appointed the hard Brexiteers to all the top posts in the Brexit talks. Bojo was Foreign Secretary, Fox International Trade Secretary, Davis Brexit Secretary, with uber Brextremists like Raab, Baker and Braverman in other posts in the Department. It would have been complete, if at that stage, Farage himself had been given a job in those talks. That way, when he too failed to implement Brexit, the blowhard would have been exposed for all to see. 

The truth is, as I said at the weekend, if No Deal Brexiters actually were in control of the government, they would quickly have to face the reality that a No Deal Brexit is practically impossible. They would quickly have to abandon that project, and shut up. The fact is that, there has never been a British National Party that could mobilise enough support behind it to get elected sufficient Nationalist MP's to form a government to push through a No Deal Brexit, and no such party exists today either. 

Blair is wrong that politics is suffering from the fact that the centre-ground is not represented by the two main parties. The centre ground no longer exists. That is why the Liberals failed in 2017, and why the Blair-rights and the Chukas have failed miserably. After 2008, the conservative social-democratic (neoliberal if you prefer that nomenclature) model based upon continually inflating asset prices ended, although central banks and conservative governments have tried to sustain it on life-support ever since via austerity, and QE, and the only two options for resolving the situation imply a shift to the extremes. One option is a reactionary option, based on attacking socialised capital, and thereby social-democracy itself. It is represent by the Libertarian/Austrian School dreams about a return to the days of classical Liberal democracy, and the dominance of millions of small capitalist producers, each fighting it out in a Darwinian struggle of survival of the fittest. It is, in reality a fantasy that can never be achieved, but which can cause great devastation as a result of its adherents pursuing it. The other option is that the interests of socialised capital are pursued, and the interests of fictitious-capital/interest-bearing capital subordinated to it. That is the progressive solution. 

Ideally, it results from progressive social-democrats, given critical support from socialists, pursing a programme of a struggle for greater industrial democracy, and a reduction or ending of the influence of shareholders in determining company policies. It involves an extension of planning and regulation of the macro-economic environment, so that the inevitable flux in the capitalist economy, as capital is reallocated from one sphere to another – and as Marx sets out, in Capital II, such flux is inevitable in a communist economy too – is increasingly smoothed and managed, and the democratically controlled industrial capital can be increasingly integrated and coordinated, as part of this process of exerting control and planning of the economy. 

This is the underlying objective economic reality that determines the political options now available. A progressive, social-democratic solution implies a commitment to this struggle for industrial democracy, which itself requires a struggle against the owners of fictitious-capital, in whose interests economies have been run for the last 40 years, i.e. of the top 0.01%, the dominant section of the ruling class, whose wealth is now almost entirely held in the shape of this fictitious capital. There is no longer any centre-ground as existed on the mirage that was pursued for the last 40 years. It requires a return precisely to some of those social-democratic ideas that developed in the post-war period. It requires, as the Bretton Woods conference established, global para state bodies to implement Keynesian style policies to regulate the supply of money-capital at an international level, to smooth financial frictions; it requires the development of larger states, such as the EU, as the nation state has long past its sell-by date; it requires the introduction of industrial democracy, and the final subordination of the interests of landed property, and interest-bearing capital, to the interests of industrial capital, by making all company boards elected by the workers and managers (the associated producers as Marx calls them) of the company. Already, in the 1970's, prior to the rise of the conservatives, such ideas were taking shape via the Bullock Report in Britain, the EU's Draft Fifth Company Law Directive and so on. 

Unfortunately, as in the 1930's, there is another way in which the interests of this large scale socialised capital can be furthered. It takes the shape of National Socialism either of the variant attempted by Stalin in the USSR, or that attempted by Hitler in Germany. It adopts all of the same kinds of state capitalist type polices of Keynesianism, it introduces its own bureaucratic form of planning and control of the economy, but it does so, from the perspective of remaining inside the framework of the nation state. To the extent it looks outwards, it does so only within the context of this nation state, and thereby of subordination of other states to its interests, initially by nationalistic methods aimed at obtaining competitive advantage via trade policies, import controls, tariffs, and so on, but inevitably, ultimately, by other methods including war, and military conquest. 

There is a clear difference between reactionaries of the Faragist, or Rees-Mogg type who are reactionary in the true sense of the term, in that they actually want to turn the clock back, to return capitalism to some previous less mature stage of development, based upon the free market, and liberal democracy, and the National Socialists. The latter should be seen, not as reactionary, but as conservative.  They don't want to turn the clock backwards, they want to preserve the dominant form of capital, large-scale, socialised industrial capital, upon which the fate of the state itself depends, but to do so, by thoroughly bureaucratic, statist methods, and within the confines of the existing nation state. As I have previously characterised this National Socialism, be it of the Stalinist or Hitlerist variety, it is social-democracy without the democracy. 

The problem we face today, is that whilst the mass of the Labour Party is truly characterised by being comprised of progressive social-democrats that looks outwards to the future, to internationalism, the Labour Leadership is infused with the ideas of National Socialism. Its agenda, as with the agenda of the Stalinists and Hitlerites is not only bound to fail, but in the process of failing, and its supporters being pushed into ever greater atrocities to try to defend it, it will be devastating to the working-class, and the long-term prospects of socialism itself. But, in a similar way, the ideas of the Faragists, Libertarians and Miseans is even more bound to fail. And, again, in the process of failing, its supporters too will find themselves agreeing with the sentiments of Hayek, and Lord Acton that they do not fetishise democracy over freedom, and will come to rely upon the endeavours of some “benevolent despot” to that attend, as they sink ever faster into Bonapartism, as the state attempts to quell the inevitable anger of the mob that turns against them. 

These are more dangerous times than have been seen in a century. Its time to choose which side you are on.