Final Thoughts on the Brexit Vote Tomorrow

The vote is now impossible to predict. For example, it is going to be extremely wet tomorrow and that will put off a lot of wobblers on both sides, Similarly, many perfectly decent but unsophisticated middle middle class people see a world of disorder and will conservatively vote for what they think will maintain order (Remain): such a desire for order amidst disorder led to the interwar errors.

On the other side, many working class people and entrepreneurial small business people may see this in cultural terms as the last stand of their culture not against immigrants but against the administrative middle classes and so be the more motivated to vote.

We could go on ... I doubt whether the rather depressing and slightly unpleasant appropriation of a dead person for political purposes will make much difference, irritating as many voters as it mobilises. The economic arguments have long since reached the limit of their power.

It is now down to instinct and sentiment and brute self-interest albeit with the so-called 'educated' middle class desperately trying to use a selection of pseudo-rational arguments to explain their choice to themselves.

If we were to characterise the underlying structure of the conflict, it would be that, although highly complex with many different strands, it is essentially the conflict between a conservative desire for an order to be supplied by an ostensibly liberal-minded administrative class in uncertain times (Remain) and a more radical instinct for change because the existing structures are no longer viable even if those who want change have different prescriptions about what to do next (Leave).

The Remainers constantly call for a 'plan' about 'what to do next' utterly missing the point that the various administrative classes of late liberal capitalist democracy have themselves failed to bring order under conditions of globalisation. Their plan is just 'more of the same' only more intensively applied.

This leaves the population with only two alternatives which the two sides now represent. The first choice is for an intensification of effort by the administrative classes to regulate disorder out of existence along a middling path (the 'plan') despite the constantly growing cracks in the paradigm.

The second choice is to step back and construct geographical and policy fire breaks against the gathering storm to protect the population and bring the administrative classes under control, either through markets or democracy or both. Either choice is broadly coherent but coherence is not necessarily the same as rational since national socialism had its coherence.

The question is whether the administrative classes have the authority and competence to manage vast numbers of humanity each with their own special interests and world views and whether the 'fire break' method can actually work against the sheer weight of forces emerging as a result of an over-rapid globalisation.

I take a Leave position because my analysis is that the administrative classes are faced with such an impossible task that they can only turn to increased surveillance, taxation (to support themselves) and even repression.

The 'fire break' approach gives nation states' and indeed communities at a lower level in the political food chain reserve powers to make decisions in their own interest, analogous to the personal autonomy necessary to make effective private and family decisions. It is really the last chance saloon, not only for stability but for the successful adaptation of populations to a more managed globalisation over a longer period of time.

The point, if one is concerned with stability, is that the system is paradoxically being destabilised by its own attempt to create a stable system. A new and more flexible and adaptable approach to the system is required. The stresses and strains within the current system are 'tectonic'. If they are not released gently, like economic crises, they will release themselves in a bigger explosion later.

What many Remainers are (I believe) not understanding is that the British Leave proposal is actually rather conservative. It detaches Britain from the system sufficiently to ensure adjustment but actually retains nearly all the existing links - unless the European Union itself seeks a confrontation (which is unlikely). It also permits re-engagement later on European reform by Europeans for Europeans.

Re-immersion in the European Union appears to solve the problem in one country but it has no effect (other than to delay the day of reckoning) on the total system, not even to improve its position. The total system continues its administrative-led trajectory towards increased disorder, made worse by the patching up being done to try to ensure the British do not leave.

So, a vote either way is problematic but a vote for Remain ironically increases the very disorder that its proponents most fear. The act of voting Remain merely pushes a 'crisis of order' forward by a few years (perhaps even months). The fundamentals say that the immersion of the nation must eventually be much deeper in an integrated European Union than many Remain voters actually want.

Perhaps Remainers will come to want an enhanced administrative authority over them as crises mount and economic prosperity fails to materialise but, if they do, then democracy will be little more than handing over power to the political wing of the administrative and managerial classes.

And when the immersion has finally taken place in full, they, as citizens, will either be part of the administrative and managerial class or subject to its desperate attempts to manage mounting entropy. Being a subject of the European administrative class is really not much better than being a subject of the pre-modern Crown.

Labour In Europe - Re-framing Internationalism as Liberal Imperialism

Much could be said about the framing of the Brexit Debate. Perhaps I will come back to this again later - especially on the deliberate confusion of being pro-European and pro-European Union - but in this posting I want to look at the reframing of internationalism by Labour In Europe.

Labour in Europe frames itself as internationalist and anti-nationalist and then associates resistance to the Project as radical nationalist and so fascist. In my earlier posting, I pointed out that this resulted in a strongly implied slur on me at one point in one of their local party presentations - only partially withdrawn, This is disgraceful but to be expected and, as I say there, not helped by some of the idiotic rhetoric of right-wing troglodytes.

In fact, democratic socialist internationalism presupposes the existence of free democratic nation states which collaborate INTER-nationally. What pseudo-democratic Leftists have done is to re-frame the debate so that supra-nationalism (that is something ABOVE nations, creating a SUPER-NATION) becomes, falsely, internationalism.

This is lie and a blatant one. A world of giant imperial SUPERSTATES (the US, the EU, Russia, China and India) is not a world of free democratic nations but is a world of competing empires in which the nations within them act within rules set by the imperial elites in their own interest. The result is the paradox that such supra-nationalism encourages nationalism as we see in the rise of the Scottish Nationalist Party in the United Kingdom and of various forms of national populism within the European Union (or should we say Empire). Those elites are always trying to manage the aspirations of the population instead of understanding them and, then, through engagement and political education, sharing in their fulfilment.

In this context, much is at stake for the British people - that is, to whom we will be subject. The last vestiges of a British Empire small enough to be reformed radically by the exercise of our own democratic political will or a massive European Empire whose very complexity strengthens the hold of its imperial elite over the levers of power.

We should not be surprised that the representatives of these imperial elites at the European level would use any means to retain and expand their power through half-truths, yes, but also through threats such as those we are currently receiving from President Hollande of France. Even an old Etonian like Darius Guppy has castigated Boris Johnson in the Spectator for not seeing that this struggle is one of national self-determination in the face of international capital. If one of the old elite can get it, surely Leftists can!

I would like to think that not all British Leftists are so pusillanimous that they will not question the claims of Labour in Europe and come to their own conclusions based on a careful analysis of the actual consequences to democracy and the economy of the Stay proposal. Recent experience has made me ... pessimistic.

The Labour Party and Its Culture of Pessimism

I saw a smidgeon, but only a smidgeon, of what Iain Duncan Smith has recently been talking about (‘bullying and threats’ from the anti-Brexit campaign) at our local Labour Party this week. I do not want to get this out of proportion. Our local Party is represented by a really decent and civilised group of people who generally treat each other with respect and courtesy. The 'bullying' (such as it was) came from an outsider. It should also be said that some of the grassroots supporters of Brexit on the Right are far more vicious in their own presentation of their case than their opponents and that these Brexit Tweeters lose votes every time they lift their malign little fingers. However, I would have expected far more from the official representative of Labour's campaign to remain within Europe.

I am not interested in naming names. It may just have been an 'off night' but the pro-European Union speaker (there was no representative of the countervailing case) directed comments at the only eurosceptic in the village (me!) which overtly associated my position with that of fascists like Nick Griffin. This was unacceptable and recognised to be unacceptable (he apologised for the 'offence' but not the misrepresenting claim) but a lot of half-truths and claims remained unchallenged and on the record. That's fine up to a point - after all, the party apparat is using a conference decision to claim priority for the pro-European case. This gives it carte blanche, one supposes, to walk all over those of us with a more nuanced vision of democratic socialism and a healthy distrust of Delorsian promises that have not been delivered, are not being delivering and will not be delivered.

It was conveniently not mentioned that the speaker might as equally be associated with Goldman Sachs as I am apparently associated with extreme nationalists but let that pass. Although (to his credit) he came clean about his presumably paid position at The European Parliament, it would also have been nice to have someone represent the Stay Campaign who did not have such an obvious professional interest in the result.

Regardless of all that, my political position was redundant. Not only was there no speaker for the alternative case (which is fine), I was not given the chance to respond to the implied slurs on my character (which was not). I did not expect to be allowed to challenge the misrepresentation and half-truths of the campaign itself and indeed had made that clear but I did think it reasonable that the specific charge of association with nationalistic fascism be refuted (the Chair failed at this point). Whatever! The membership seem totally sold on the European Project regardless of anything that I might have said in any reasoned way. Further intervention on my part would have been useless. I just disliked being treated like that by a 'comrade' who had been placed in a superior position by the decision of the Executive Committee ... if I was not such a tough nut, I think I might reasonably call that 'bullying'. Nor am I alone in this from reports in other parts of the country. It may raise questions for many people whether this liberal internationalist and European Socialist Party is really their natural home but I think that assessment comes later.

I walked away that evening very much more aware of the determination and resources of the soft left machine behind Stay within the Labour Party (with its very glossy and well produced brochure), of the risks that the Party is taking in its potential alienation from its historic working class base (not only on this matter but on the refugee crisis), of the dominance of the left-liberal (rather than democratic socialist) component of the Party and of the lack of fairness and tolerance towards other voices on this issue on the grounds that it was 'party policy'. This reproduces the mentality of past Labour top-down authoritarianism if worn with a relatively velvet glove.

Further reflection has also made realise just how much the party machine is broken in terms of its responsiveness to the twin needs of mobilising and engaging new members and creating a machinery for political education that can act as a transmission belt between the wider population and the 'avant-garde' of party thinking. Again, do not get me wrong - the local Party is friendly, vigorous in its own way, and making serious attempts to professionalise its approach to the electorate. There was an excellent local election policy statement developed by a leading member, albeit one that threatened to be turned into a curate's egg by its need to satisfy the standard liberal-left posturing on some issues.

But rules (which, of course, members can do nothing about) that mean that a member only gets a CLP vote when they go through the palaver of attending a branch meeting and getting elected as a 'delegate', and the way that these delegates are forced into supporting branch resolutions created in meetings which they could not attend, means that many new members sit at the CLP as observers rather than participants, delegates lose an important degree of autonomy in discussing policy and the processes are excessively manipulable by the sort of activist who can give up time at the convenience of the party calendar.  Small branches can also be out-manouevred by the effective organisation of large branches instead of being in the position of persuading the members as a whole on the merits of a case.  Surely members themselves should feel free in their own right to bring up resolutions if they can get sufficient support from other members.

Of course, to be fair, the branch activists are also the ones who organise the machinery that gets candidates into office and so perhaps should have some additional rights but the balance strikes me as wrong. The sort of party reform that has been batted around since the mid-1990s is long over due. It is good to hear that Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, is looking into this and, indeed, according to reports, is giving special attention to the digital issue which includes the particular problem of the possible disenfranchisement of those who do not have digital access. These are complex issues with no easy answers but at least there seems to be some intent to grapple with them under the new Leadership team.

In my own case, as a result of the manner in which the meeting was held this week, I came to a decision that I could not face our local electorate (as requested) in May under conditions where I might be misrepresented as supportive of the European Project simply by virtue of being a Labour candidate and so I withdrew.  Six months of engagement in the Party has started to make me feel uncomfortable on other grounds. The bottom line was that I could see that taking on UKIP in a strongly working class area would be almost impossible under such circumstances making me, suddenly, a pessimist which is not what I want to be - and life is short!

The Party's own aggressive stance on Europe had simply made me more determined than ever to stand for non-fascist and non-racist democratic socialists' argument for Leave and to give that struggle absolute priority, to the exclusion of every other political project, over the next four months. The national pessimism about May seems to have become infectious. I have caught the disease so that saving the nation from supra-nationalism in the greater interests of its working people in the long run suddenly seems so much more important than maintaining the illusory dreams of the jobsworths in the European Parliament. This does not mean that the Labour Party and Labour Movement are not to be supported as the primary voice for progressive politics in the United Kingdom (quite the contrary - they are, sadly, the only voice left!) but it does mean that the support should not be as unconditional as it once was in the days of tribal politics.

As I see it, the Labour Party at the moment has become mired in a 'culture of pessimism' as a result of the disastrous Blair-Brown legacy, the failure in the 2015 Election and the prospect of losing millions of pounds because of some particularly self-interested and vicious Tory legislation. Spend time with any activists working at a national level and they are excessively pessimistic about the prospects for their own Party. They are excessively pessimistic about their own Leadership in many cases. They are certainly ridiculously pessimistic about the opportunities to continue the democratisation and transformation of our own nation. As a result, this culture of pessimism has grabbed hold of an utterly undemocratic belief (for it is a belief) that a Social Europe can do the job that the Party cannot do domestically. This is added to a romantic idealism in which internationalism is reframed as supranationalism, democracy as platonic bureaucratism and the genuine cultural concerns of the working class as proto-fascism.  In other words, these liberal idealists would prefer a bureaucratic Europe to impose their values on the British people rather than persuade the British people to adopt those values itself.  That is not the democratic way and yet what has distinguished the Left in Britain since the days of the Chartists has been its commitment to democracy.