Brexit and the shape of things to come.

This blog has argued that the British EU referendum is a sham. Both sides have substantially the same economic and social programme for the future of the UK and its people. (The Brexiteers are marginally worse.) The characterisation of the referendum as being the most important decision of 'our generation', or of 'greater significance that any decision taken since WW2' is an estimate as hollow (but as noisy) as a drum. The heart of capitalist Europe, the eurozone, will remain unbreached either way. The City of London's international web will remain untouched.

This blog has also judged that, on balance, a vote to remain in the EU is the marginally better course. The rest of the left in Europe are highly unlikely to see Britain's decision, if it is to leave the EU, as in any way progressive. And that will have nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that somehow, against all the odds, the British left that supports exit have seen farther ahead and more accurately than their European mainland counterparts. It also has nothing to do with whether you think that the central institutions of the EU are or are not reformable - the second of which views this blog also believes.

Comparisons with 1975 only show the contrast between then and now. In 1975, and despite the racists, the British left led the fight against membership. The left would have been strengthened by a 'no' vote. Today Brexit is the defining political tool in the recomposition and re-consolidation of the right in British society. It is the main reason to vote to remain in the EU at this point.

And the shape of Britain's 'rennovated' right is now emerging from the fairy dust.

We have seen the emergence of Berlusconi, the cheerful right wing billionaire cutting through Italy's traditional political swamp, attaching the country to his personal power and turning corruption into an art form. In a more organised and successful political context, Sarkozy renamed and turned France's main rightwing party, the Republicans, into his own personal operation. And Social Democratic Hollande is about to give him his third chance (if Le Pen junior does not get through to the final.) In the US, Trump, a billionaire emperor, has turned the traditional Republican party inside out and now seriously threatens to defeat the Clintons' heartless, establishment machine. And in the UK a decrepit Tory party threatens its 'renewal' through Brexit, when the day after any 'no' vote is successful, the leader of UKIP, Farage, calls on his 4 million voters to do what the left did when it turned into the hollowed out Labour Party to elect Corbyn, install a new leader in the shape of the malevolent clown Boris Johnson, and to take a new direction apparently into eternal Thatcherdom with a tinge of the Tory's own ancient racism, last promoted by Enoch Powell.

This prospect, like similar, national fantasies that blossomed from the lips of Berlusconi, or Sarkozy and now from Trump's petulant mouth, amount to nothing. International capitalism's engine room will remain the key driver of politics across the West whatever the result of the British referendum (or even the US presidential contest.) But the right in the West is evolving and finding new voices.

We argue in this blog that this process should be clearly recognised and as far as possible disrupted.