British referendum

A short essay on Britain's Referenda

Two referenda in the UK, the first deciding on Scottish Independence in 2014 and the next on membership of the EU, focus like cross hairs in a telescopic sight, picking out the vulnerabilities of Britain's political system.

Referenda are a novelty in British politics.

In 1975, Labour leader, Prime Minister Harold Wilson, launched what he called 'the solemn referendum.' It was the first in British political history. Then as now its main purpose appeared to be the need to deal with a short term political split in one of the two main, Westminster parties; in Wilson's case the Labour Party. In 1975 the question was whether Britain should be part of 'the European Common Market'.

The British economy was in a mess in 1975. Then, as now, big capital was on an investment strike (although in those days most companies paid their taxes). Then as now Britain's productivity was therefore the lowest of all the leading countries in the West. The main establishment argument as to why Britain was in such an economic state in 1975 was the political claim that an over-powerful working class and their mass trade unions poisoned the prospects of growth. That assertion is now unavailable to the new - old Etonians, whose parents dedicated themselves to the destruction of Britain's labour and trade union movement.

The entitled sons and daughters of the next generation often still try on the trade union union bogey for size, but now it is used to politically influence the 4 million plus who are forced to 'work for themselves', or the 5 million plus without permanent contracts, in an attempt to galvanise them rightwards by claiming union members have special privileges. That is what Chancellor George Osborne means when he talks about his future Tory Party being the party of 'workers and strivers.' But with the odd exception of over-enthusiastic toadies like Business Secretary Sajid Javid, nobody in ruling circles really believes anymore that the unions are a problem for Britain's economy. However as the unions' hardened remnants are now emerging as a deeply serious political factor in the opposition to austerity and war (see UNITE's support for the Peoples Assembly and union backing for Corbyn) our rulers believe that now is the time for the final demise of organised labour.

In any case the real problem in 1975 was not at all a Labour Party split or 'overmighty union bosses', but rather that the membership of the European Market was another major adjustment for Britain away from Empire and its lingering Commonwealth shadow. It was a big a symbol of the end of a certain sort of Britain, just as the Attlee Government's withdrawal from India at the end of WW2, and Wilson's withdrawal of all British military 'East of Suez' in 1967/68 had been. (See Saki Dockrill, Britain's Retreat From East of Suez, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, which analyses all the relevant released government documents from the period.)

In other words, behind the referendum in 1975 stood the requirement for British capitalism to make an historic shift out of the remains of Empire and, while saving as much as possible from that era, particularly its global finance industry, then grab what benefits it could from Europe's growing success. These benefits for British capitalism were seen as springing from a projected alliance with the growing industrial might of Germany (for the foreseeable future without, in the view of London, a wise and credible international political and financial leadership that the UK could provide) in collaboration with the US - and against France.

The 1975 referendum was the political means by which the British ruling class consolidated a decisive turn from its past. Most significantly, its long term, established political apparatus, including two major parties and a stable political system, could not, by itself, deliver the required result. The referendum was an unprecedented step. Such decisive shifts before 1975, to go to war, to annex overseas territories, to join international organisations like NATO or the UN required no such political novelty. Indeed, in most cases such decisions did not even require much in the way of direct parliamentary activity. 1975 was the first time in the 20th century that Britain's long term, stable, unshakable political stability faced a strategic failure. Its system could no longer be trusted to deliver on a key cause at a decisive moment. It was not to be the last.

The referendum on voting systems held in 2011 turned into the first of what was to become a series of political routs for the Liberals as a result of their support for the Tories in a coalition government. Even then most commentators wrote that the issue of fair votes would have to return. The 2011 referendum solved nothing except in its prediction of the demise of the Liberal Democrats.

The two referendum questions raised most recently, first in Scotland and now on EU membership, have also had to go beyond the confines of Britain's traditional political system. And this is despite the fact that the latter, a decision on EU membership, carries nothing like the historic content of the first time round. In other words, Britain's 'normal' political machinery is getting weaker and even the three referendums this decade have not 'solved' and look unlikely to 'solve' the questions that they raised and will raise over the EU. On the contrary, so far, two out of the three have simply opened the door to a wider and deeper debate.

History repeats itself. The Scottish question, regardless of the 2014 result, is opening a new stage in British politics and continues to be of immense significance to Britain's future. But the second EU referendum is more reminiscent of Marx's epithet

'once as tragedy; once as farce...'

The Tory spilt on the EU certainly has echoes of Wilson's party problems in 1975. But this time it is much more than echoes we hear. This is the real thing. It is the modern Tory split itself, and not any potentially great movement in the political economy of Britain, which is the main and critical focus of the next EU referendum vote. Britain's political crisis has taken another lurch away from its much praised stability, not just by its requirement for a referendum as such, but also to deal with the threat to Britain's main party of government. Why? Because Britain's political crisis (and therefore the coming EU referendum) has finally come home to the absolute centre of its traditional political leadership, in the shape of the woeful political condition of Britain's modern Tory party.

Although the UK Independence Party (UKIP) scored 4 million votes in the May 2014 General Election it ended up with one MP and a busted leadership. But the political bloc that UKIP has created in British society remains largely intact. That bloc is represented in both main classes in society. Labour has immense problems, created largely out of decades of spineless pandering to chauvinist and racist moods and support for the war mongering that has given rise to the refugee problem. But as both Scotland and Wales show, there is nothing inevitable about these divisions inside the working classes. They are, ultimately, not based on material foundations. However there have been gigantic changes among 'small and medium enterprise' owners and the wealthy. The split in the ruling classes is seismic - right across the Western world and in the BRIC countries. The modern ruling class has become semi-detached from their national roots (with the partial exceptions of China and the USA.) The head of 'Britain's' largest investment company and the ninth largest in the world, Aberdeen Asset Management, recently opined that whether Britain stayed in or went out of the EU was of no material consequence to him or his company.

Large-scale manufacturing in Britain is largely a product of foreign investment (eg Cars and Steel) and the industrial sector, both small and large, sees the European market as central to its exports. In 1948, British industry (including manufacturing, oil and gas extraction, and utilities) accounted for 41% of the British economy. By 2013, it was just 14%. At the same time the services sector's share of the economy has risen from 46% to 79%. The UK manufacturing industry has declined at the fastest pace of the G7 economies; resulting in the UK moving from having one of the largest shares in 1948 to the lowest in 2012. (ONS statistics April 2014.) This sector expressed in ruling class politics, mainly inside the Tory Party, has had the smallest voice for years.

Now there is a genuine shift. The most dynamic and richest part of Britain's ruling class are sailing off into the global stratosphere (or the Caymen Islands) and are essentially unmoved by Britain's membership of the EU either way. The Tory Party's most traditional and patrician centre is now alarmed by Britain's unbalanced economy and its increasing distance from the country's political management and therefore sincerely believes that the answer lies in more foreign investment to rebuild a firmly UK based industrial sector (albeit ultimately owned by the Japanese, the Chinese and the Indians.) Although such investment depends on open access to the EU for exports, its sources are plainly outside. Under the strain created by the flight of British wealth from its national allegiances, and the Tory turn to non EU reservoirs of wealth to rebuild a British economy, the traditional social bloc that has underpinned Tory dominance in mainstream politics in the UK for decades - is falling apart. And while being inside or outside the EU does not resolve any of this, it has become the symbol of what a large swathe of traditional Tory support regards as the key to the future.

This Tory bloc includes those who are alarmed by the rights of EU workers and their competition in the UK; many of the SME who, like most of Britain's economy, are concentrated in the service sector and who need foreign tourists from the US and China and no 'regulations' from the EU. They hate and envy the grand corporations who get away with paying no tax. And, increasingly, they regard the Tory centre as just as remote as the head of Aberdeen Asset Management. The desertion of a key sector Britain's traditional ruling class has rocked the keystone in the Tory Party's social edifice. The most powerful part, economically speaking, of Britain's ruling class has literally deserted their post.

The Tory vote, as with Labour, has been in decline since the 1970s, but its essential core has not, up to now, fractured. That is exactly what threatens in the coming EU referendum - and for all of Prime Minister Cameron's palliative efforts, the outcome of the vote will also fail to resolve the Tory's future because it does not address the economic and social disintegration of Britain's traditional ruling class.

Neither of the two new referendums therefore solve Britain's chronic political crisis. Indeed, over time and given their confluence, they are likely to make it worse.  Already the Scottish National Party, the current government of Scotland, has raised the problem of a likely 'yes' vote in Scotland approving EU membership, when and if England vote 'no'. SNP leaders have suggested that would provoke the immediate requirement for a new Scottish referendum on independence. Even if England also votes to remain in the EU, should there be a substantial difference in the vote across Britain's nations, Scotland's distinct opinion will again reinforce the argument to rerun the Independence vote. Labour's loss of northern votes to UKIP and its isolation in the south outside London reinforces Scottish political feelings that the only way to get the sort of country they want is to break the ties with Westminster.

Tied to this 'gordonian knot' is of course the fate of the British Labour Party. It is obvious that Scottish voters voted overwhelmingly for the SNP to represent them in Westminster last May because they believed that Labour could not effectively represent them in a British Parliament. They voted SNP for Westminster despite their differences on independence. In the May elections this year we will see the impact of the new Corbyn led Labour Party both inside Scottish Labour (which is still led by a Blairite) and among Scottish voters. (Scottish Labour is starting from such a dreadful position that they can hardly do any worse.) But even if the Corbyn factor strengthens the Labour vote in Scotland, it is unlikely that in the short term Scotland will shift back to Labour, because while government is from Westminster, Scots do not believe Labour can win southern England and Scottish votes for Labour in the context of a Westminster Parliament would therefore be wasted.

The effects of the Scottish referendum, despite its 10% majority for the 'no' camp, cannot be squeezed back into the 'traditional' political bottle. And the coming EU referendum will reinforce that fact.

Equally disheartening for those in Britain who would like their politics 'to get back to normal' the EU economic social and political crisis is itself heading towards 'Accident and Emergency.' That question belongs to a separate blog.

In other words, and despite the two British referenda being designed to cover over the weaknesses of Britain's standing political system and its main parties, they will not even solve the problems that were designed to settle and neither will their results create a 'return to normal' in their wake. Scottish independence is not going away any time soon. Neither will the vote on EU membership settle Britain's political and economic future in or out of Europe. We have already seen how the Scottish referendum on independence has opened, not closed, a Pandora's box. And whatever the result on the EU vote, Britain is inexorably joining the destabilised politics of most of the main European nations.

There are also new political forces and patterns are emerging from this 'shaking of the kaleidoscope.' Labour's Corbyn leadership is the first mainstream political example of these changes - as tens of thousands emerging from a new left, created by the movement against austerity and war, took the opportunity to fill the empty structures of the old Labour Party and vote for a left leader. The emerging battle in the Labour Party opens the door to 'new politics' in the sense of the possibility of new parties, new economics, a new view on war and nukes and new voting systems to get there. Paradoxically, should Scottish Labour take the bold step of separating from its English connexion while adopting the Corbyn political outlook - substantially to the left of the SNP - it would have a much greater chance of winning Holyrood, the Scottish parliament. In any case an independent Scottish parliament would open the door to Britain's first left socialist government. There is already a huge mass movement against austerity and war which, should the real 'new politics' fully emerge, and provide the instruments and vehicles needed for the movement to find its political expression in the mainstream, add to its causes the right for a new  political system that can burst out of the compromised shambles that characterises most of political life and embrace the real problems facing Britain and its nations' futures.

The old political system cannot contain, let alone resolve, the problems of a modern British capitalist society, but nor does it have its historic strength or cunning to destroy the new politics; the politics of a root and branch alternative.

Next; what should the left in Britain do about the EU?