“We should
cut the heads off the politicians,” said the waiter in Corfu to us, as
EU-imposed austerity crushed Greece in 2010. Before the week was out there were
riots in Athens, buildings were set on fire and three bank employees burned to
death.
Thankfully,
we’re nowhere near that stage, but if you lift the lid off social media you’ll
see the pot is bubbling ferociously. Britain is split in two, each half calling
the other all sorts of names. Most of these ranters qualify for jury service
and the franchise; one trembles at the thought of “direct democracy.” One in
four of the population is said to suffer from a mental disorder and to judge by
Facebook it’s plausible.
But in a
way, hardly surprising. Far from seeking to reunite the country, professional
politicians in the UK have been fomenting discontent among Remainers and have
even advised EU leaders on how to subvert the Referendum result.
[i]
Is it a coincidence that the Daily Mail has been given a new editor who has U-turned
the paper’s line and now characterises Brexiteers as “saboteurs” leading us to
an “abyss”?
[ii]
Even the
Eurocrats are infected. Mr Van Rompuy, who looks as if he couldn’t decapitate a
boiled egg, fantasises about holding a knife to our throat
[iii];
Mr
Tusk, even less loved in his
native Poland than here
[iv],
smirks at a vision of “those who promoted Brexit” in Hell
[v].
Their intemperate language is a clue to the fact that there is not one but two
crises brewing.
The first is
the European Union’s. Jean Monnet’s dream of a Europe that could never make war
with itself again, has been caught in the trap of confusing aim with method. Full
political unification has been pursued clandestinely and with an almost suicidal
obsession, like Captain Ahab after his White Whale. As a prelude, the single
currency was forced into being despite the unreadiness of participants like
Greece and Italy, both of which fudged their economic data to qualify and have
suffered for it since.
The EU’s appetite
for centralised control and aggrandisement remains unslaked (would C P Snow
have dubbed them “the labradors of power”?) Straight after the centenary of the
Armistice, Frau Merkel returned to her theme of a European intervention force.
[vi]
Now she is after an aircraft carrier
[vii]
- just when it is rumoured that China plans to sell off her own to Pakistan.
[viii]
How does one justify the expense of such capital ships, with their increasing
vulnerability?
[ix]
And the
interference in the Ukraine that has heightened tensions between the Western
alliance and Russia – see the military build-up in the region on both sides
[x]
[xi]
- hasn’t put the EU off its plan to foster supranational order elsewhere, too:
“Africa is the future,” said Mr Juncker in his 2018 “State of the Union”
address, urging more collective arrangements there of the kind that were the
foundation stones of the EU.
[xii]
In the midst
of this, Brexit and the common man threaten to spoil the grand project of the
philosopher-kings. Again and again, on shows like Question Time, ordinary
people are bluntly challenging their elected representatives to do what was solemnly
promised in 2016.
This brings
us to the second, local crisis. By affirming (not only orally but in the
official pamphlet
[xiii])
that the Referendum would be held once only and that the result would be implemented
whatever the outcome, our leaders effectively turned it into a binding
plebiscite; and now they wish to resile.
That has
raised and dashed expectations in the most emphatic way, and the implications are
dangerous. If this vote is delegitimised, then so are all the ones passed in Parliament,
many of them by a smaller margin than four per cent
[xiv].
What would
the consequences be? Former Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab said on last week’s
Question Time that there will be a “day of reckoning” if Brexit is nullified
[xv],
and he may be thinking of deselections, Party membership cancellations and the
shattering of the two-party system itself. But some think, or worse, wish, that
it could go further – even Dr Richard North has said, perhaps only half-jokingly,
“It is not only ideas that develop in the provinces – so do revolutions.”
[xvi]
Fortunately,
revolutions and civil wars don’t just happen, and a good thing too, as whatever
the outcome the process is horrific; and often long-drawn-out, because unlike a
war there’s nobody to make peace on behalf of the whole country. They need an
evil constellation of factors, but that discussion is for another occasion.
Having said
that, one of the possible triggers is major financial dislocation. Not just the
vindictive awkwardness in trading arrangements that the EU appears to be
preparing for us, cutting off its nose to spite its face, but the kind of long-cycle
economic downturn that Irving Fisher
[xvii],
Nicolai Kondratiev
[xviii]
and others have theorised.
The role of
debt has been overlooked by many economists and Professor Steve Keen has
estimated that only some 20 out of 10,000 professionals foresaw the 2008/2009 Global
Financial Crisis. For those who think the crisis is over because of Quantitative
Easing and Modern Monetary Theory, it’s worth noting that global debt is now
bigger than ever – some three times the size of the world’s GDP.
[xix]
Despite high levels of money-printing we are not yet seeing significant
inflation, but that is because economic demand is dropping and debt servicing
is a growing challenge; the turnover of cash is slowing and offsetting the
effects of monetary inflation.
[xx]
Also, the US dollar, the world’s reserve currency, is being snapped up by
foreign countries scared of local currency depreciation/default, so at present
those dollars are not cascading back into the USA and boosting the price of
everything, says analyst Martin Armstrong.
[xxi]
Harder times
are coming: goodbye cheap energy, a booming consumer economy and abundant
public services; hello to cheating WASPI women of their promised State
pensions, trimming the social benefits of the
gilets jaunes and so on. Ordinary wage-earners now need additional
financial support to make ends meet; real hourly wages have pretty much stalled
over the last 40 years since the multinationals saw massive opportunities for
capital in global workforce arbitrage. Sir James Goldsmith warned
[xxii]
about the socio-economic consequences at the time of GATT in 1994, and now it
has all come to pass.
It will go
on until it can’t, but who knows when or how that will happen?
When the
times come that “try men’s souls”, the search is on for an ideological map to
find our way out. Power relations come under scrutiny. In the eighteenth
century, the American colonists adopted the Enlightenment analysis that rooted
power in the consent of the people, so that when General Gage defended his
lumping American rebel officers with their men by saying that he recognised
only ranks derived from the King, George Washington replied that for his part
he could not conceive any rank “more honorable that that which flows from the
uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people - the purest source and original
fountain of all power." Five months later came the publication of Tom
Paine’s “Common Sense”, arguing on the same lines and setting the movement
alight.
Ian Geering
QC’s piece this week on the Bruges Group site (10 March) follows this tradition.
[xxiii]
It is a normative political philosophy – this is how we feel things ought to be,
rather than how they have been for most of recorded history. Did the Americans
complain of taxation without Parliamentary representation? Leeds, Birmingham
and Manchester shared their plight, while Old Sarum had seven voters and two
MPs.
[xxiv]
Up to the twentieth century, only a fraction of the adult British population
could vote at all, and had to resort to other means to register their
dissatisfaction: as Tony Benn observed at the time of the Maastricht
capitulation, “Riot has historically played a much larger part in British
politics than we are ever allowed to know […] Unless we can offer people a
peaceful route to the resolution of injustices through the ballot box, they
will not listen to a House that has blocked off that route.”
[xxv]
And that, as of last night (12 March 2019), is where we are: watching a cloth-eared Parliament rejecting an "open prison" Withdrawal Agreement yet fighting against a clean break, either way negating what the people decided upon.
Yes, the people
are divided – by their very nature, votes are divisive; the key to peace is to
accept them as decisive. But those with access to power and the media have
worked hard to jemmy the cracks wider. The process of re-radicalisation has
started, and this time the State seems either unconscious of the peril, or
(like George III) sure of its ability to patronise and repress.
Britain
nearly had a conflagration in 1789. The philosopher Richard Price, a friend of
Paine, gave a French Revolution-inspired speech: "A Discourse on the Love
of Our Country", looking at the fundamentals of politics and, like Paine,
rooting power in the people. The reception was enthusiastic (a term with
distinct connotations of danger, in those days.)
The State
was alive to the danger, and acted. Certain gentlemen came to advise Price on
his future conduct. Burke began to compose a justification for the British
Constitution in rebuttal. 1789 marked the last time a woman was burned at the
stake (in London, for coining.) Radical groups such as the London Corresponding
Society were infiltrated by government agents and ultimately suppressed; yet
even with the brakes on, the vehicle of power was pushed inch by inch, over the
next century, towards electoral reform and democratisation.
Answering
the radicals who took revolutionary France as their model, Edmund Burke
articulated a pragmatic scheme for the Parliamentary government we now have, a
balance between the royal Executive and popular representation, and between
constituency representation and mere delegation. This circumvented the bloody
conflict of first principles that played itself out on the other side of the
Channel.
But Burke
was addressing the problem of how we govern ourselves, not whether we
should be able to govern ourselves at all; even pragmatism has its limits.
And on this latter issue, the people - firmly assured by their representatives
that this vote would be decisive - made their determination. The task of their
representatives was then to carry it through, while closing the divisions among
the people as they went forward. They have failed on both counts. The issue has
now turned from UK versus EU, to people - a confused, disunited, squabbling
people - versus Parliament itself.
All our
democratic progress is in danger of being thrown away.
For if the
solution to the threat of revolution in Britain as France burned was to fashion
its own sustainable form of democracy, then to discard democracy is to wind the
clock back to pre-revolutionary days. And then the clock will start forward
again, towards fresh crisis – and solutions that have already failed.
[i] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/03/10/tony-blair-secretly-advising-emmanuel-macron-brexit-former-pm/
[ii] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6305601/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Saboteurs-endangering-nation.html
[iii] https://twitter.com/zacgoldsmith/status/1100441759669198848?lang=en
[iv] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/01/03/polands-foreign-minister-calls-eus-donald-tusk-icon-evil-stupidity/
[v] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47143135
[vi] https://www.politico.eu/article/angela-merkel-emmanuel-macron-eu-army-to-complement-nato/
[vii] https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/germany-proposes-european-aircraft-carrier/
[viii]
https://nation.com.pk/10-Feb-2019/china-to-sell-aircraft-carrier-to-pakistan
[ix] https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/navy-aircraft-carriers-too-vulnerable-survive-34917
[x] https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nato-priorities/2018/06/25/poking-the-bear-us-air-force-builds-in-russias-backyard/
[xi] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-military-buildup.html
[xii] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2019/02/21/the-uk-will-remain-an-integral-part-of-an-ever-closer-europe/
[xiii]
“The EU referendum is a once in a generation decision… This is your decision.
The government will implement what you decide.” https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/why-the-government-believes-that-voting-to-remain-in-the-european-union-is-the-best-decision-for-the-uk/why-the-government-believes-that-voting-to-remain-in-the-european-union-is-the-best-decision-for-the-uk
[xiv]
E.g. the Callaghan government fell in 1979 when the vote of no confidence was
carried by a single vote.
[xv] https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1097284/Brexit-news-dominic-raab-BBC-question-time-brexit-secretary
[xvii]
https://seekingalpha.com/article/104135-irving-fisher-on-debt-deflation-and-depression
[xviii]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kondratiev_wave
[xix] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-15/global-debt-of-244-trillion-nears-record-despite-faster-growth
[xx] https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2014/september/what-does-money-velocity-tell-us-about-low-inflation-in-the-us
[xxi] https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/armstrongeconomics101/economics/the-fallacy-of-mmt/
[xxii]
Part 1 of 5 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PQrz8F0dBI
[xxiii]
https://www.brugesgroup.com/blog/who-governs-and-by-what-right
[xxiv]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs#Rotten_boroughs
[xxv] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199192/cmhansrd/1991-11-20/Debate-6.html
